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(CNN) — A federal judge on Thursday ordered key Trump administration agencies to preserve messages sent on Signal between March 11 to March 15.
Judge James Boasberg made the ruling in a preservation lawsuit brought in the wake of the revelation that Cabinet officials were discussing war plans on Signal. The Justice Department says the administration is already working to track down and preserve the Signal texts from that period.
Boasberg’s temporary restraining order also directs the administration to file a status report Monday, accompanied with declarations from government officials, explaining the steps the agencies were taking to preserve the messages.
The messages in question include exchanges about US military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. The Atlantic reported earlier this week that just hours before the March 15 strikes, top members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet discussed detailed operational plans in a Signal group thread.
A day after the revelation, a watchdog group filed a lawsuit accusing the Cabinet officials on the chat of violating federal records law. Sources told CNN that the details shared in the group message by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were classified, though the Trump administration has denied it.
American Oversight, the nonprofit advocacy group that brought the records-preservation lawsuit, said Thursday’s ruling “marks an important step toward accountability.” The group had asked in the lawsuit for the federal courts to force Trump administration officials to do better record-keeping.
“The public has a right to know how decisions about war and national security are made — and accountability doesn’t disappear just because a message was set to auto-delete,” the group’s interim executive director, Chioma Chukwu, said in a statement.
The judge focused Thursday’s 20-minute court hearing on “finding common ground” between the Trump administration and American Oversight so that he could issue a temporary restraining order to which both sides would be amenable.
Prior to the hearing, the Treasury Department said it has already tracked down and preserved a “partial” version of the chat for federal record-keeping purposes. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was part of the March 15 Signal chat, and the text of those messages are now preserved, a department official wrote to the court in a sworn statement.
Though he didn’t mention it explicitly, Boasberg is also presiding over the high-profile case challenging Trump’s invocation of a rarely used war power to swiftly deport migrants. The Signal case was assigned to Boasberg by chance, the judge said, acknowledging possible questions from the public, explaining in detail how the random case assignment system works in DC’s federal court.
During Thursday’s hearing, Boasberg also slyly referenced a major dispute in the deportation case, around whether the administration was obligated to follow an order he issued verbally from the bench before he put it in writing. As he told the DOJ lawyer what he was ordering in the records preservation case, Boasberg said, with a grin, “Don’t worry, it will be in writing.”
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
CNN’s Katelyn Polantz and Kaanita Iyer contributed to this report.
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