The Trump administration this week invoked the “state secrets” privilege to try and keep U.S. District Judge James Boasberg from further investigating whether the government violated his orders on deportations. “The information sought by the Court is subject to the state secrets privilege because disclosure would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs,” officials argued in a court filing to Boasberg on Monday.
In technically unrelated news, The Atlantic that same day published a shocking report that the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a group chat with top members of President Donald Trump’s national security team, in which the officials discussed an impending military operation in Yemen earlier this month. “The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen. I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming,” Goldberg wrote.
That evolving scandal — and the lack of consequences to date for the administration officials involved — emerges as the government asserts national security concerns to Boasberg in the ongoing litigation over Trump’s bid to summarily deport people under the Alien Enemies Act.
Of course, the group chat debacle — it occurred over the Signal messaging application that people use to try and keep conversations secret — is a separate matter from the deportation litigation.
But now there’s a lawsuit related to the Signal situation. And guess who’s been randomly assigned to preside over it?
That’s right: Boasberg, who Trump already said he wants impeached over his rulings in the deportation litigation (a demand that prompted a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts). The Signal suit was filed Tuesday by the watchdog group American Oversight against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials. It 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 legal complaint. Again, the deportations and military chat situations are distinct on multiple fronts and are the subjects of distinct litigation. But the latter litigation is set to proceed before a judge who, based on the administration’s conduct in the deportations case, might view the government’s national security claims through a skeptical lens. 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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