US judge James Boasberg has made a temporary prohibition order against the deletion of messages in the controversial cat.
A federal judge has announced that he will order the US government to preserve the messages from a reported cat where senior officials have discussed plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen.
This cat has since become the subject of national controversy, resulting from the accidental inclusion of an Atlantic magazine journalist in the discussion, who revealed sensitive military information.
On Thursday, Judge James Boasberg judged that the administration of President Donald Trump had to take measures to keep the full conversation registers between March 11 and 15, when the journalist had access to the conversation.
The judge’s order stems from the concerns that messages may be deleted, in violation of the Federal Acts on files.
A non -profit guard dog called American Oversight had filed a temporary ban prescription to prevent the deletion of original messages, which were finally published this week in the Atlantic.
He argued that messages should be given to the public. He also noted that the Atlantic had pointed out that signal messages had been defined to delete automatically – some in a week, others in the four weeks.
“It is nothing less than a systematic effort to escape the rules of record retention of the federal government,” wrote the lawyers of American Oversight in a legal file. “There is no legitimate reason for this behavior, which deprives the public and the congress of an ability to see the actions of the government.”
The non -profit organization founded its argument on the 1950 law of federal files, which created a plan for government transparency.
This law creates standards to preserve and publish government documents, and has also been updated to also include electronic documents.
But American Oversight argued that the Trump administration could use Signal – a messaging application with end -to -end encryption – to avoid compliance with the law.
“The use by the defendants of an unused commercial request, even for questions of life and death, such as planning a military operation, led to the inevitable conclusion that defendants must have used a signal to carry out other official government activities,” said his legal file.
A representative of the Trump administration reassured Judge Boasberg that measures were already in place to collect and preserve the remaining messages.
The use of the signal for top secret exchanges was revealed on Monday when the Atlantic published the first in a series of articles on the subject of the editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
The journalist explained that he had received an invitation from someone who seemed to be the national security advisor Mike Waltz to join a conversation on the application.
After accepting the invitation, Goldberg found himself among some of the highest-end officials in the United States: the accounts seeming to belong to the Vice-President JD Vance, the Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth participated in the cat.
Goldberg said he had realized that the conversation was authentic – and not an elaborate configuration – when, on March 15, the attacks that were revealed in the cat occurred in real life.
“I have never seen a violation like that,” wrote Goldberg in his first article. “It is not uncommon for national security officials to communicate on the signal. But the application is used mainly to meet planning and other logistical questions – not for detailed and highly confidential discussions on an in progress military action. ”
The Trump administration responded to the article by denying any confidential information had been published in the cat.
But Goldberg responded with a second article sharing more messages that revealed the bombing campaign schedules, as well as when F-18 planes wore the missiles.
“Listen, look, everything is a witch hunt,” Trump said at an event on Wednesday. He rejected calls to reject Waltz and HegSeth or call apology. He also blamed signal, saying that the application “could be defective”.
The acting executive director of the American Oversight, Chioma Chukwu, praised the decision of Judge Boasberg to stop any destruction of messages on Thursday.
“We are grateful to the judge’s bench to arrest any other destruction of these critical files. The public has the right to know how decisions concerning war and national security are taken – and responsibility does not disappear simply because a message has been put in a repair,” said Chukwu in a statement.
