U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered Trump administration officials to preserve communications from the messaging application Signal that featured in the recent scandal stemming from officials’ discussing military operations in a group chat that included a journalist who wasn’t supposed to be there.
After a hearing Thursday, the judge issued an order stating that government defendants “shall promptly make best efforts to preserve all Signal communications from March 11-15, 2025.” It further said the defendants need to file a status report by Monday detailing the steps they’ve taken to preserve those messages.
Watchdog group American Oversight sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials following the publication on Monday of a shocking report about the chat. The communications occurred over Signal, which can be set up to delete messages automatically.
American Oversight’s lawsuit seeks to “prevent the unlawful destruction of federal records and to compel Defendants to fulfill their legal obligations to preserve and recover federal records created through unauthorized use of Signal for sensitive national security decision-making,” according to the group’s legal complaint filed Tuesday.
The group moved for a temporary restraining order, asking Boasberg to order Hegseth, National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to “immediately desist from unlawfully destroying federal records in violation of the Federal Records Act.”
More specifically, the group asked Boasberg to order that officials:
(a) take steps to ensure the preservation of any federal records that were created between March 11 and March 15, 2025, regarding and including any messages that are or were contained in “the Signal chat,” as referenced in the Complaint … ; (b) … initiate action through the Attorney General for the recovery of any destroyed federal records that were created between March 11 and March 15, 2025, regarding and including any messages that are or were contained in “the Signal chat,” as referenced in the Complaint … and (c) take steps to confirm that the use of any electronic messaging applications with an auto-delete function by any Defendant individually or within their respective agencies, including Signal, complies with all requirements of the Federal Records Act … and the related rules and regulations of their respective agencies.
Ahead of Thursday’s hearing, the government defendants argued in a memo that the group’s claim that officials failed to take measures to prevent the destruction of Signal messages “is not reviewable.” They also argued that a restraining order is unnecessary “because the Defendant agencies are already taking steps to locate and preserve the Signal chat at issue, and at least one agency has already located, preserved, and copied into a federal record keeping system a partial version of the chat.” Before being assigned to preside over this case, Boasberg was already handling another high-profile national security-related matter, over the administration’s deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. Boasberg, the chief federal trial judge in Washington, D.C., issued temporary restraining orders in that case and raised questions about whether officials had violated his orders. Litigation in that case is continuing after a divided federal appeals court panel declined to upend Boasberg’s restraining orders. President Donald Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment after he ruled against the administration in the deportation litigation, which led Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare public statement stressing that the proper response to an adverse ruling is an appeal, not an impeachment. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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