Federal judge declines to order Trump officials to recover deleted Signal messages : NPR

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has issued a preliminary injunction ordering top national security officials who discussed military operations on the encrypted messaging service Signal to notify the acting archivist of the United States of any messages they have that may be at risk of being deleted. But in calling for those records to be preserved, the ruling stopped short of ordering the government to recover past messages that may already have been lost.

American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, brought the lawsuit after the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a group chat on Signal in which Trump administration officials discussed a planned U.S. military attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen. American Oversight says the officials violated federal records law with their use of Signal, a commercial messaging app that allows messages to be automatically deleted.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. judge James Boasberg said American Oversight had failed to show that the recordkeeping programs of the agencies involved in the case are “inadequate,” or that “this court can provide redress for already-deleted messages,” as the group had requested.

“Plaintiff has provided no reason to believe that ordering the Attorney General to use her “coercive power” to “shak[e] the tree harder” … would bear any fruit with respect to already-deleted messages,” Boasberg wrote. “The Court therefore cannot conclude that American Oversight’s request for communications that have already fallen victim to Signal’s auto-delete function remains redressable given Plaintiff’s own representations to the contrary.”

But the judge granted the group a partial victory when it comes to messages that have not been erased.

“Because the looming erasure of automatically deleting Signal messages qualifies as such an imminent destruction of records, and because the Attorney General could prevent that destruction by instructing Government officials to halt the messages’ deletion, it remains possible for the Court to provide relief,” he wrote.

“We expect immediate compliance — and if they drag their feet or fail to act, we are fully prepared to pursue further legal action to ensure government records, which belong to the public, are preserved and protected,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight in a statement.

Questions about potentially classified information

Goldberg’s reporting about the chat shocked military and intelligence experts and became the focus of a review by the Pentagon’s acting inspector general. Lawmakers serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee have expressed concerns about whether top national security officials shared classified information in a chat. The committee raised these concerns after journalist Goldberg detailed exchanges from the Signal chat, revealing messages where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared sensitive information about targets, weapons, and attack sequencing just before airstrikes took place.

Hegseth has vehemently denied any discussion of classified war plans in the Signal chat, a claim supported by the White House. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the incident had been reviewed and closed, with steps taken to prevent a recurrence.

However, controversy surrounding the use of Signal by administration officials persisted when it was reported that Hegseth shared attack details in a separate Signal chat involving his wife and brother. This revelation led to a watchdog group filing an amended complaint in late April, citing the widespread use of Signal for official government business by senior administration officials.

The complaint alleges that officials violated the Federal Records Act by conducting government actions on an unauthorized messaging platform, which does not comply with federal record-keeping regulations. American Oversight, the watchdog group, also claims that administration officials failed to preserve their messages, as some participants had enabled the auto-delete setting.

In response to the complaint, the court ordered administration officials to preserve records from the specified chat dates. While the defendants assured compliance with the order, subsequent filings by American Oversight raised doubts about the specifics of what had been saved.

Despite these concerns, Judge Boasberg seemed to dismiss American Oversight’s argument, suggesting that the defendants had followed their agencies’ policies to preserve messages effectively.

Overall, the issue highlights the challenges posed by the use of personal messaging apps for conducting official government business. The controversy underscores the importance of adhering to federal record-keeping laws to ensure transparency and accountability in government communications. text to make it more concise:

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