WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A U.S. judge on Thursday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to preserve messages sent on the Signal messaging app discussing attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen that became public after they were inadvertently shared with a journalist.
The order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg requires federal agencies whose leaders participated in the chat, which included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, to maintain all messages sent through Signal from March 11 until March 15, the period during which an editor for The Atlantic magazine documented activity in the chat.
A lawyer for the Trump administration earlier said federal agencies were already working to determine what records still existed so they could be preserved.
American Oversight, a government accountability group, sued federal agencies involved in the chat on Tuesday, alleging that 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,” Chioma Chukwu, American Oversight’s interim executive director, said in a statement.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Atlantic magazine published on Wednesday messages it said were exchanged in the group after Trump administration officials said they were not classified in an attempt to play down the impact of the breach.
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.
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.
The lawsuit was unrelated to the national security implications of the disclosure and instead focused on American Oversight’s claim that the messages should count as government records that agencies are legally required to preserve.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Deepa Babington)
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