A federal judge said Friday it’s too late to order the recovery of already-deleted Signal messages from key members of President Trump’s Cabinet, largely rejecting a request from an oversight group to get involved.
But U.S. District Judge James Boasberg did order acting National Archivist and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to take steps to preserve Signal chats across the government at risk of being deleted.
“At this juncture, the Court largely denies American Oversight’s slew of requests and will instead grant only narrower relief,” the judge wrote.
American Oversight, a group that regularly files records lawsuits against the federal government, sued five top Trump officials following revelations that they discussed a military strike in a group chat on the encrypted messaging app — and unintentionally included a journalist.
They had asked the judge to order the officials to preserve all Signal communications and recover chats that had been deleted.
However, Boasberg noted, American Oversight’s own “emphatically stated” representation to the court was that destroyed Signal messages cannot be recovered and to issue the directive would be fruitless.
The challengers’ “hardline stance” that deleted Signal messages are gone for good overshadows their later efforts to suggest recovering the messages might be possible, especially if the nation’s intelligence agencies were to try.
“Although Plaintiff tries to walk that stance back — claiming in its Reply that recovery is feasible ‘[r]egardless of Signal’s statement of policy,’ — that belated assertion wilts in the face of its repeated claims to the contrary in both its Amended Complaint and Motion,” Boasberg said.
Though Boasberg ordered Rubio to ask Bondi to act on the messages “not yet gone with the wind,” he also noted that the attorney general has the discretion to ignore that request.
Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, revealed the Signal group chat after he was unintentionally added to it by now-former national security adviser Mike Waltz.
The Trump officials used the encrypted chat to discuss a strike on the Houthis in Yemen. More than a dozen top officials, like Vice President Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were part of the chat. However, only five were sued: Hegseth, Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, said in a statement that the ruling affirms that Trump administration officials are not above the law and the records of their official actions belong to the American people.
“It should never have required court intervention to compel the acting Archivist and other agency heads to perform their basic legal duties, let alone to refer the matter to the Attorney General for enforcement,” she said. “But because they failed to act, the court has now stepped in to order what the law already requires.”
Chukwu added that the group expects “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.”
Updated at 7:08 p.m. EDT
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