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

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 on the Senate Armed Services Committee have also raised concerns about whether top national security officials shared classified information in the chat.

In his reporting, Goldberg detailed key exchanges from the Signal chat, including messages in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared information about targets, weapons and attack sequencing just ahead of the airstrikes.

Hegseth has adamantly denied that any classified war plans were discussed in the Signal chat. The White House has also denied that any classified plans were shared, and said in March that its review of the incident had concluded.

“This case has been closed here at the White House as far as we are concerned,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “There have been steps made to ensure that something like that can obviously never happen again, and we’re moving forward,” she said.

Controversy surrounding the use of Signal by administration officials dogged the White House a month later when the New York Times reported that Hegseth shared details of the attack on a second Signal chat that included his wife and brother.

“It is now clear that the use of Signal to conduct official government business by administration officials is widespread: senior administration officials used, and likely continue to use, a commercially available text message application with an auto-delete function and no apparent mechanism to fully preserve federal records on government recordkeeping systems,” the watchdog group wrote in an amended complaint filed in late April.

Hegseth is named as a defendant in the American Oversight suit, alongside Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

What the plaintiffs allege

The plaintiffs allege that officials violated the Federal Records Act by discussing “official government actions” on the messaging platform, which is not an authorized system for keeping federal records, according to their complaint. The 1950 law outlines the legal framework by which federal records are meant to be preserved.

American Oversight has also argued that administration officials failed to preserve their messages, noting that multiple individuals who participated in the group chat had the auto-delete setting turned on.

In an initial ruling in March, Boasberg ordered administration officials to preserve any records from the chat dated March 11 to March 15.

The defendants told the court they had taken steps to comply with the order and preserve records, but American Oversight said in subsequent filings that they had “serious questions” about what exactly the government had saved. They said declarations by defendants submitted to the court lacked key specifics, and that “no Defendant” had attested to saving the chat “in its entirety.”

In the case of Ratcliffe, the group alleged that the CIA director failed to comply with the court’s order. “Because of this failure, Signal communications may have been lost,” they said. The defendants denounced the allegation saying it sought to “stir public controversy without basis in fact or law,” and that Ratcliffe had complied with the court’s order.

In his opinion issued Friday, Boasberg appeared to cast doubt on American Oversight’s argument, writing that the defendants, “did not appear to have any difficulty in following their respective agencies’ policies to preserve the messages that had not yet been deleted.”

“For these reasons, Plaintiff’s claim that the agencies’ formal recordkeeping programs violate the FRA is unlikely to succeed,” he wrote.

NPR disclosure: Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR, chairs the board of the Signal Foundation.