Judge Moves to Prevent Hegseth, Waltz and Others From Deleting Houthi Texts

A federal judge in Washington on Thursday ordered several Trump administration officials who participated in a Signal group chat discussing the details of a pending attack in Yemen to preserve all of the messages they exchanged on the app from March 11 to March 15.

The decision by the judge, James E. Boasberg, came in response to a lawsuit filed this week by a nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight, accusing Mr. Trump’s national security team of violating federal records laws by using Signal — an encrypted commercial communications platform — to chat about the attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The order by Judge Boasberg, who sits in Federal District Court in Washington, applied to top administration officials, including Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence; and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

At a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington, Judge Boasberg made clear that he had issued his order to be sure that none of the Signal messages were lost, not because he had made a finding that administration officials did anything wrong.

American Oversight, which often seeks to pry loose information from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, has accused the administration officials of violating the Federal Records Act, which requires official communications by agency officials to be preserved.

The revelation that top Trump administration officials not only discussed a pending military strike on Signal, but also inadvertently invited a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, into the chat, has shocked the national security establishment. The lawsuit filed by American Oversight was in some sense a pre-emptive measure to ensure that the full record of what was said on the group chat was not deleted.

The Justice Department, in a filing on Thursday afternoon, said that one of the participants in the group chat, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, had already turned over the version of the messages that was on his phone.

In the same filing, a lawyer at the Pentagon asserted that he had requested a full copy of the chat from Mr. Hegseth, but it remained unclear whether it had been turned over.

This is a developing story and will be updated.