United States Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary containment order against the removal of any message to the controversial chat.
A Federal Judge has announced that the United States Government will be ordained to preserve the messages of a signal chat where they discussed maximum officials Plans to bombard The hoodi goals at Yemen.
Since then, this chat has become the subject of a national controversyDerived from the accidental inclusion of a journalist from Atlantic Magazine in the discussion, which revealed sensitive military information.
Judge James Boasberg ruled that President Donald Trump’s administration must take steps to maintain the records of the full conversation between March 11 and March 15, when the journalist had access to the conversation.
The judge’s order comes from concern that messages can be eliminated, in violation of the Federal Registers Act.
A non -profit watchman named American Superight had presented a temporary containment order to prevent the removal of original messages, which were finally published this week in the Atlantic.
He argued that messages should be released to the public. He also said that the Atlantic had reported that the signal messages were automatically defined, some in a week, others in four weeks.
« This is no less than a systematic effort to evade record retention rules in the federal government, » the lawyers for North -American Supervision wrote in a court presentation. « There is no legitimate reason for this behavior, which deprives the public and the congress of the ability to see government actions. »
The law of 1950 based its non -profit argument on the Law of Federal Registers, which creates a model for government transparency.
This law creates standards to preserve and release government documents and has been updated to include electronic documents as well.
But American supervision has argued that the Trump administration can use signal (a messaging application with end-to-end encryption) to avoid compliance with the law.
« The use of the accused of an unproofed commercial request, even for life and death issues, such as the planning of a military operation leads to the inevitable inference that the defendants must have used a signal to carry out other official government businesses, » said their court presentation.
A representative of the Trump administration reassured Judge Boasberg that the measures were already in their place to collect and preserve the remaining messages.
The use of signal for first secretary exchanges came to light on Monday when the Atlantic published The first of a series of articles on the publisher’s topic in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
The journalist explained that he received an invitation from someone who seemed to be national security adviser Mike Waltz to join a conversation in the application.
In accepting the invitation, Goldberg found some of the highest officials in the United States: the accounts that seem to belong to the Vice President JD Vance, the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, participated in the chat.
Goldberg said he realized that the conversation was authentic and not an elaborate configuration, when, on March 15, the bombings that revealed to the chat went to real life.
« I have never seen such a breach, » Goldberg wrote in his initial article. « It is not uncommon for national security officials to communicate on signal. But the application is mainly used for meeting and other logistics planning, not for detailed and highly confidential debates of pending military action. »
The Trump Administration responded to the item When deny Any confidential information was published on the chat.
But Goldberg responded with a second article by sharing more messages that revealed the bombing campaign schedules, as well as when the F-18 planes that the missiles carried.
« Look, look, it’s all a witch hunt, » Trump he said in an event on Wednesday. He has rejected calls to say goodbye Waltz and Hegseth or apologize. He has also blamed Signal, saying that the application « could be defective ».
The temporary director of North -American Supervision, Chioma Chukwu, praised Judge Boasberg’s decision to stop on Thursday any destruction of the messages.
« We appreciate the judge’s decision for stopping any other destruction of these critical records. The public has the right to know how to make decisions about war and national security, and accountability does not disappear only because a message was undone, » Chukwu said in a statement.
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