Federal judge orders Trump administration to preserve evidence of compromised text messages – JURIST
An all too familiar federal judge to President Donald Trump ordered his administration on Thursday to preserve a set of text messages exchanged between high level government officials on the Signal messaging app, which contained sensitive military and strategic information that included targeted strikes in Yemen.
The messages were exchanged over a period of four days between March 11 and March 15 and the order covers this entire period. The messages apparently also included discussion of sensitive operations involving Vice President J.D. Vance and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
The order comes in response to an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) filed by American Oversight, a nonprofit and non partisan US watchdog. Specifically, the TRO requested the court to order Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Acting Archivist Marco Rubio to “comply with their mandatory obligations under the Federal Records Act” and preserve all communication exchanged through Signal for the said time period.
The TRO itself follows a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by American Oversight challenging the Trump administration’s use of Signal to discuss military operations. The group alleges the officials violated federal law by using Signal’s auto-delete feature for discussions about military operations and failing to preserve these communications as required by the Federal Records Act. That suit is also seeking a declaration that these messages are federal records, and injunctions compelling officials to comply with record-keeping laws, referral to the Attorney General for enforcement, and recovery of deleted communications.
American Oversight highlighted the risks to democratic accountability that are created “when public officials conduct government business on secretive, untraceable platforms — particularly when those platforms are designed to erase records automatically.” American Oversight Interim Executive Director Chioma Chukwu cheered the order stating:
This order marks an important step toward accountability…We are grateful for the judge’s ruling to halt any further destruction of these critical records. The public has a right to know how decisions about war and national security are made — and accountability doesn’t disappear just because a message was set to auto-delete. American Oversight remains committed to bringing full transparency to this case and revealing to the public the dangerous security vulnerabilities this administration has created.
Judge James Boasberg has become a thorn in Trump’s side as of late to the point of the president calling for Boasberg’s impeachment and labeling him a “Radical Left Lunatic…a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama,” when in fact Boasberg was originally appointed to the DC Superior Court in 2002 by former president George W. Bush before being elevated to his current position by Obama. Boasberg had apparently invited such remarks from the president by issuing a TRO blocking Trump’s attempts to invoke the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members en masse to El Salvadorean prisons.
The calls for Boasberg’s impeachment were immediately condemned by the legal community including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts who remarked that an appropriate response to to disagreement with a judge, as has been established for over two centuries, is appeal and “not” impeachment. This specific case involving the Signal messages was assigned to Boasberg on Wednesday.
