A federal judge is holding a hearing Thursday on the Trump administration’s use of the Signal messaging app, after top national security officials used the app to discuss military strikes in Yemen as they were taking place earlier this month.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who is also overseeing the case involving the administration’s deportation of alleged migrant gang members under the Alien Enemies Act, was assigned to the Signal case after the government transparency group American Oversight filed a federal lawsuit claiming the use of Signal violates the federal law that governs the preservation of government records.
After President Donald Trump early Thursday accused Boasberg on social media of “grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself,” the judge began the 4 p.m. ET hearing by providing a detailed description of the D.C. District Court’s automated system for assigning cases, including how each judge is allotted “electronic cards” to ensure cases are fairly distributed.
“That’s how it works, and that’s how all cases continue to be assigned in this course,” Judge Boasberg said.
Boasberg earlier this month temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 200 alleged gang members to El Salvador without due process, leading the White House to call for his impeachment and publicly attack him as a “Democrat activist” and a “radical left lunatic.”
The Signal lawsuit — which names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the National Archives as defendants — asks a federal judge to declare the use of Signal unlawful and order the cabinet members to preserve the records immediately, as messages within Signal can be set to delete automatically, in violation of governmental record-keeping requirements.
Lawyers for the Department of Defense, prior to the hearing, filed a declaration stating that they have requested that a copy of the Signal messages in question be forwarded to an official DOD account so they can be preserved.
A second declaration, from a lawyer for the Treasury Department, stated that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, along with Bessent’s chief of staff, have retained all messages beginning with Mike Waltz’s messages on March 15.
The use of the Signal group chat was revealed Monday by The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who said he was inadvertently added to the chat as top national security officials, including Hegseth and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, were discussing the military operation.
President Trump and other top administration officials have downplayed the use of the Signal to discuss the attack, saying classified information was not shared in the chat, despite the exchange including information on the weapons systems being used and the timing of the strikes.
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