US federal judge James Boasberg on 27 March ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to preserve all messages sent via the Signal app between 11 and 15 March that relate to planning attacks against the Houthis in Yemen.
On Tuesday, federal agencies involved in the Signal chat app were sued by the government watchdog group American Oversight. The group claims that the use of the app, which allows messages to be automatically deleted after a certain period of time, violates the federal Records Management Act.
“We are grateful for the judge’s decision to stop any further destruction of these important records. The public has a right to know how decisions about war and national security are made – and accountability does not disappear just because a notification was set to automatically delete,” said American Oversight’s acting executive director.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said Judge Boasberg had no authority to hear cases related to the Trump administration, accusing him of bias. Trump himself has previously called for Boasberg’s impeachment over another ruling that banned the deportation of Venezuelan migrants.
The Atlantic magazine on Wednesday published the allegedly full text of correspondence between senior US officials, including the Pentagon chief and the US vice president, in the messenger chat room Signal, which erroneously included the publication’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
The correspondence includes data such as the timing of US strikes against Yemeni Houthis and the types of aircraft used in those strikes, as well as preliminary information about the results of the strikes.
Earlier, Defence Minister Sshapit Hagseth said that no one in US President Donald Trump’s administration “sent text messages about military plans” on messenger Signal.
Hagseth called Goldberg, who revealed the secret chat on messenger Signal, “a lying and extremely discredited so-called journalist”.
On 24 March, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of US magazine The Atlantic, described how President Donald Trump’s national security team included him in a secret chat room discussing strikes against Yemen’s Houthis. He said the discussion took place on the messenger Signal, which allows the exchange of encrypted messages. The chat included Trump’s national security adviser Mike Walz (he was the one who sent Goldberg the invitation), Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defence Pete Hagset and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The chat was called the Houthi PC small group (“small group versus Houthi”). In it, Goldberg writes, a user named Pete Hagseth posted data “about upcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would deploy, and the sequence of attacks.”
The journalist appeared in the chatroom under the initials JG. He suggests that he was added by mistake instead of some other senior White House official with the same initials.
At first, Jeffrey Goldberg did not take the correspondence seriously, but when the chat room began to receive messages, Goldberg realised that “the conversation had a high level of plausibility”.