A US judge has ordered the Trump administration to preserve messages sent via Signal discussing attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen.
The order from US District Judge James Boasberg, which requires federal agencies to maintain all messages sent through Signal from March 11-15, follows revelations this week the plans were inadvertently shared with a journalist.
On Wednesday, The Atlantic magazine published the entire Signal chat that included its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
He was added to a high-level discussion that included US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, national security adviser Michael Waltz, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance and national intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard.
A lawyer for the Trump administration earlier said federal agencies were already working to determine what records still existed so they could be preserved.
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Some of the Signal messages. Source: The Atlantic
American Oversight, a government accountability group, sued federal agencies involved in the chat. It alleges the use of Signal, which allows for messages to be automatically deleted after a certain time span, violated a federal record-keeping law.
“We are grateful for the judge’s bench 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’s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Atlantic published messages it said were exchanged in the group after Trump administration officials tried to downplay the impact of the breach by saying they were not classified.
The messages revealed discussions among senior national security officials about planned military strikes targeting the Houthi militant group. Hegseth shared information about the timing of attacks on March 15, including one aimed at someone identified in the chat as a terrorist, hours before the attack began, according to the report.
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‘I wasn’t there’: Trump distances himself from group chat scandal
The existence of the group chat, and the inadvertent disclosure of messages to a journalist, has sparked a brewing controversy over the Trump administration’s treatment of sensitive military and intelligence information.
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Source: Fox News
President Donald Trump has sought to distance himself from the scandal, saying he “wasn’t there” and suggesting that Signal could be “defective”.
He has also stood by those involved, saying Waltz (who assembled the chat) was “a good man” and Hegseth is doing “a great job”.
But Republican lawmakers, while so far stopping short of calling on Hegseth to resign, have warned the incident is a clear “strike” against him.
“I think they should make sure it never happens again. I wish they’d tell us, ‘It will never happen again’. It’s the first strike in the early stages of an administration,” Republican Senator Kevin Cramer said.
“Don’t let it ever happen again.
“I don’t know how many strikes you get. In baseball, you get three. Maybe this is worth two. If mistakes like this continue to happen, we’ll deal with them as it happens. My hope and my expectation is that it won’t.”
Hegseth’s spokesman, Sean Parnell, has said “there were no classified materials or war plans shared”.
“The secretary was merely updating the group on a plan that was underway,” he said.
But one Republican senator said that was the worst of the ongoing scandal.
“The worst part of it is Hegseth saying himself, ‘This didn’t really happen’. Why don’t you just admit it?” they said.
“It’s going to have to be investigated.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said no classified information was posted to the Signal chat.
American Oversight’s lawsuit was unrelated to the national security implications of the disclosure and instead focused on it claim the messages should count as government records that agencies are legally required to preserve.
-with AAP