Judge Orders Government to Preserve Records from Signal Chat about Attack on Houthis

Federal District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the government “to preserve all Signal communications between March 11 and March 15.”

This order is in response to a lawsuit filed by American Oversight to make sure records are kept from a Signal chat group in which high level government officials discussed detailed war plans for an attack against Houthis in Yemen, and into which National Security Adviser Michael Walz inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief at The Atlantic magazine. Walz set the messages to automatically delete after one week, then changed the automatic deletion delay to four weeks. Government records are supposed to be kept for at least two years.

Defendants in the lawsuit include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, all of whom were among the large list of officials in the chat group.

The government suggested that preservation of the records was accomplished by The Atlantic. Goldberg initially published only the least sensitive portions of the chat in his first article about it. After being assailed by government officials who insisted they discussed nothing classified in Signal, he published the entire chat, redacting only the name of an active CIA officer.

Some content in the published chat strongly suggests government officials are using Signal routinely to discuss sensitive matters, even though they are not supposed to use it for anything other than information that could safely become public. Boasberg’s order covers more than the messages Goldberg saw before he realized what he was witnessing was not a spoof and left the group: Other messages sent by officials in Signal during the time window specified by the order should be covered by the order too.

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