Judge says it's too late to order recovery of Trump officials' Signal messages [View all]
Source: The Hill
06/20/25 6:22 PM ET
A federal judge said Friday it’s too late to order the recovery of already-deleted Signal messages from key members of President Trump’s Cabinet, largely rejecting a request from an oversight group to get involved.
But U.S. District Judge James Boasberg did order acting National Archivist and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to take steps to preserve Signal chats across the government at risk of being deleted. “At this juncture, the Court largely denies American Oversight’s slew of requests and will instead grant only narrower relief,” the judge wrote.
American Oversight, a group that regularly files records lawsuits against the federal government, sued five top Trump officials following revelations that they discussed a military strike in a group chat on the encrypted messaging app — and unintentionally included a journalist.
They had asked the judge to order the officials to preserve all Signal communications and recover chats that had been deleted. However, Boasberg noted, American Oversight’s own “emphatically stated” representation to the court was that destroyed Signal messages cannot be recovered and to issue the directive would be fruitless.
Read more: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5361553-judge-says-its-too-late-to-order-recovery-of-trump-officials-signal-messages/
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