Signal group chat leak: judge orders Trump administration to preserve all messages from 11-15 March – live
Deportations case judge assigned to Signal leak case orders all group messages must be preserved
James Boasberg, the judge Donald Trump says should be impeached over his handling of court proceedings regarding Trump’s hardline immigration policy, is currently conducting a hearing in a lawsuit filed over “Signalgate.”
Trump complained about Boasberg earlier today, posting a long rant in which he called Boasberg’s assignment “disgraceful” and implied it was rigged against him.
“Boasberg, who is the Chief Judge of the DC District Court, seems to be grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself, even though it is not supposed to happen that way,” Trump wrote, adding: “The good news is that it probably doesn’t matter, because it is virtually impossible for me to get an Honest Ruling in D.C. Our Nation’s Courts are broken, with New York and D.C. being the most preeminent of all in their Corruption and Radicalism. There must be an immediate investigation of this Rigged System, before it is too late!”
Now, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports that Boasberg felt obliged to begin his Thursday hearing with “a detailed explanation of the random case assignment process, emphasizing that he did not ask for or somehow proactively get this case”.
Boasberg has also “ordered the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.
A reminder, if it could possibly be needed: “Signalgate” refers to a group chat about airstrikes in Yemen, between top national security advisers and containing national security information, to which national security adviser Mike Waltz apparently inadvertently added Jeffery Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
More, from Hugo Lowell:
Key events
Justice department civil rights division investigates Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA to root out ‘DEI discrimination’
Attorney General Pamela Jo Bondi announced on Thursday that she has directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford University, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using what she called “illegal DEI policies” to select students from diverse backgrounds.
“Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellow of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181 (2023), colleges and universities are prohibited from using DEI discrimination in selecting students for admission, and the Department of Justice is demanding compliance” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” said Bondi.
As we reported last month, a group co-founded by a professor of law at UCLA to fight what he calls the covert use of affirmative action in admissions decisions by colleges in the University of California system filed a lawsuit, aiming for an injunction to prohibit any consideration of race in student admissions.
‘We try to keep Congress informed’, Musk tells Fox of cuts made by his team
In an interview with Fox, Elon Musk and members of his so-called “department of government efficiency” team defended their role in making sweeping cuts to spending by federal agencies that has been legally appropriated by Congress.
“But the process still involves Congress, right, at some level?” the Fox host Bret Baier asked.
“We try to keep Congress as informed as possible. But the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly; it should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully”, Musk said. “It’s not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud, it is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress”.
Baier, a former golfing partner of Donald Trump, did not press Muck to explain why his team has repeatedly failed to uncover fraudulent spending, instead pointing again and again to spending that he and other Republicans disagree with, but was lawfully appropriated by Congress.
“Usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics”, Musk then claimed, falsely. “We are like well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can’t point to any”.
In fact, journalists have repeatedly discovered that specific items identified by Musk’s team as supposed waste or fraud, starting with the false claim that $50m was budgeted to send condoms to Gaza, were either mischaracterized, exaggerated or entirely invented.
A man was scheduled to appear in court in Las Vegas today, charged in relation to acts of vandalism in which Tesla cars were set on fire with molotov cocktails.
Attacks on Teslas and Tesla dealerships have been reported in relation to Tesla owner Elon Musk’s work for Donald Trump, overseeing brutal cuts to federal government staffing and budgets carried out by the so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that “Paul Hyon Kim, 36, was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on Wednesday on a total of 15 counts, including suspicion of arson, destroying or injure real or personal property of another, value $5,000 or greater, possessing/disposing of a fire device, all felonies, and misdemeanor discharging a firearm into a vehicle”.
Kim is also facing “facing federal charges of unlawful possession of an unregistered firearm (destructive device) and arson, according to court records”, the paper said.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has promised harsh treatment for anyone found guilty of vandalizing Teslas and Tesla properties, calling such attacks “nothing short of domestic terrorism”.
Las Vegas law enforcement posited “very loose” ties between Kim and leftwing groups but said investigations continued.
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Marina Dunbar
Two Democratic commissioners fired by Donald Trump from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit on Thursday to challenge their “indefensible” terminations.
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, whose controversial firings were announced last week, are suing the Trump administration for “unlawfully” removing them from their positions.
“The President’s action is indefensible under governing law,” the complaint, obtained by the Guardian, states. The firings should be legally declared “unlawful and ineffective”, it argues, adding that the court should formally instruct the FTC’s leadership to allow Slaughter and Bedoya to serve out the remainder of their terms.
Under the FTC Act, a commissioner can only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. The act also says that no more than three of the FTC’s five commissioners can be of the same political party. After the terminations, the FTC currently holds a 3–0 Republican majority.
“The president’s attempt to terminate commissioners Bedoya and Slaughter is contrary to federal law and nearly a century of supreme court precedent,” said Amit Agarwal, special counsel for Protect Democracy, which is representing Slaughter and Bedoya in the lawsuit.
“This isn’t about Democrats versus Republicans or liberals versus conservatives – it’s about an economy governed by laws rather than political whims.”
Full story:
Marina Dunbar
The US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth – a central figure in the “Signalgate” scandal – has a tattoo that appears to read “infidel” or “non-believer” in Arabic, according to photos on his social media account.
In photos posted on Tuesday on X, the former Fox News host had what appears to be a tattoo that says “kafir”, an Arabic term used within Islam to describe an unbeliever. Hegseth appears to have also had the tattoo in another Instagram photo posted in July 2024.
Some people on social media criticized Hegseth for getting a tattoo that could be considered offensive to Muslims, especially as the US military seeks to represent a diverse pool of faiths. It is estimated that upwards of 5,000 to 6,000 US military members practice Islam.
“This isn’t just a personal choice; it’s a clear symbol of Islamophobia from the man overseeing US wars,” posted Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist in New York.
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The “Signalgate” lawsuit heard by Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC this afternoon was filed by American Oversight, an independent advocacy group.
The group said its motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) sought to force the Trump administration “to immediately halt any further destruction of critically important federal records regarding the administration’s use of Signal to discuss military planning”, which key figures did in regard to airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, only for national security adviser Mike Waltz to add a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, to the high-level chat.
“The motion asks the court to order the defendants, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State and acting Archivist Marco Rubio, to comply with their mandatory obligations under the Federal Records Act.”
Bizarre as it may sound, Rubio is indeed the acting national archivist – as well as secretary of state and head of USAid.
As reported by Politico, Judge Boasberg this afternoon granted the TRO, “order[ing] the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.
Chioma Chukwu, interim executive director of American Oversight, said: “Using disappearing messaging apps to plan highly sensitive military operations isn’t just a transparency problem – it’s a national security crisis and potentially criminal.
“These officials chose platforms specifically designed to leave no paper trail for decisions that could cost lives and impact global stability.”
Deportations case judge assigned to Signal leak case orders all group messages must be preserved
James Boasberg, the judge Donald Trump says should be impeached over his handling of court proceedings regarding Trump’s hardline immigration policy, is currently conducting a hearing in a lawsuit filed over “Signalgate.”
Trump complained about Boasberg earlier today, posting a long rant in which he called Boasberg’s assignment “disgraceful” and implied it was rigged against him.
“Boasberg, who is the Chief Judge of the DC District Court, seems to be grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself, even though it is not supposed to happen that way,” Trump wrote, adding: “The good news is that it probably doesn’t matter, because it is virtually impossible for me to get an Honest Ruling in D.C. Our Nation’s Courts are broken, with New York and D.C. being the most preeminent of all in their Corruption and Radicalism. There must be an immediate investigation of this Rigged System, before it is too late!”
Now, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports that Boasberg felt obliged to begin his Thursday hearing with “a detailed explanation of the random case assignment process, emphasizing that he did not ask for or somehow proactively get this case”.
Boasberg has also “ordered the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.
A reminder, if it could possibly be needed: “Signalgate” refers to a group chat about airstrikes in Yemen, between top national security advisers and containing national security information, to which national security adviser Mike Waltz apparently inadvertently added Jeffery Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
More, from Hugo Lowell:
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke for two whole minutes earlier, when he was asked about his decision to revoke a visa given to Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a graduate student at Tufts University in Boston who co-wrote an op-ed critical of the school for not divesting from Israel.
Rubio’s remarks seem worth quoting at length – given his increasingly angry and harsh tone and given his involvement in other immigration enforcement actions such as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate with a green card and an American wife who is nonetheless being held for deportation without being accused of committing a crime, under a law from 1952 – the heart of the Red Scare.
Rubio was once seen as the face of a new Republican party, potentially more friendly to immigrants.
In Guyana, he said:
We just send this message out: if you apply for a visa to enter the United States, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just that you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings and creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa if you lie to us, the United States, and with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.
And once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legal in the United States. And we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it’s just that simple.
I think it’s crazy. I think it’s stupid for any country in the world to welcome people into their country, they’re going to go to your universities as visitors … and say, ‘I’m going to your universities to start a riot. I’m going to your universities to take over a library and harass people.’ I don’t care what movement you’re involved (in). Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt?
We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we’ve given you a visa, and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away. I encourage every country to do that, by the way … So we’ll revoke your visa, and once your visa is revoked, you’re illegally in the country and you have to leave.
Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn’t. If [I] … say, ‘I want to come to your house for dinner, and I go to your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray painting your kitchen,’ I bet you you’re going to kick me out. But we’re going to do the same thing if you come into the United States as a visitor and create a ruckus for us. We don’t want it, we don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country, but you’re not going to do it in our country.”
Ozturk wrote an opinion column. Friends said she was not active in campus protests. Reyyan Bilge, a friend, posted on X: “Rumeysa has been my student, colleague, friend for over a decade. She does not carry a hateful bone in her body, let alone being antisemitic.”
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Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, broke off from campaigning on Thursday, ahead of a general election next month, to address what he called “Canada’s response to the latest developments in the trade crisis”.
“Yesterday, in the latest salvo in his trade war, President Trump again imposed unjustified tariffs on out nation, in violation of our existing trade agreements,” Carney told reporters, noting that Trump’s 25% tariffs on cars and car parts would impact more than “500,000 hardworking, dedicated Canadians”.
“With time it will become apparent that these actions will end up hurting American workers,” Carney said.
He announced that Canada will wait until next week, when the auto tariffs are set to take effect, to respond, but said nothing is off the table regarding possible countermeasures.
Carney said that he would speak to provincial premiers and business leaders on Friday to discuss a coordinated response.
“It doesn’t make sense when there’s a series of US initiatives that are going to come in relatively rapid succession, to respond to each of them. We’re going to know a lot more in a week, and we will respond then,” he said.
One option for Canada is to impose excise duties on exports of oil, potash and other commodities.
“Nothing is off the table to defend our workers and our country,” said Carney, who added that the old economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States was over.
Rubio says he has already revoked hundreds of visas from student protesters
Speaking to reporters in Guyana on Thursday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio defended his decision to revoke the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts, who co-wrote an opinion article critical of the school for not divesting from Israel, and said that he has already revoked hundreds of visas from student protesters he characterized as “lunatics”.
Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
Asked what specifically had triggered the detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was snatched off the street outside her home on Tuesday, Rubio pivoted to his general claim that any student who applied for a visa to study in the US would not have been allowed in to the country if they had said they wanted “to participate in movements that are involved in vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus”.
“I don’t care what movement you’re involved in”, Rubio added, “if we’ve given you a visa and you decided to do that, we’re going to take it away. I encourage every country to do that.
“If you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,” Rubio added.
Ozturk is from Turkey, where protests have been banned after the leading opposition candidate to run for president was suddenly arrested. Turkey’s state-run news agency, Anadolu, noted in its report on her arrest that the doctoral student had co-authored an opinion article in which the authors called on the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.
Trump withdraws Elise Stefanik’s nomination as UN ambassador
Donald Trump has withdrawn his nomination of his staunch supporter and New York representative Elise Stefanik as the US ambassador to the UN.
Citing the necessity to “maintain every Republican seat in Congress”, Trump took to Truth Social to explain his decision on Thursday, saying:
“As we advance our America First Agenda, it is essential that we maintain EVERY Republican Seat in Congress. We must be unified to accomplish our Mission, and Elise Stefanik has been a vital part of our efforts from the very beginning. I have asked Elise, as one of my biggest Allies, to remain in Congress… With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat. The people love Elise and, with her, we have nothing to worry about come Election Day.”
Trump went on to say that “there are others that can do a good job at the United Nations”.
Lisa O’Carroll
Ireland is bracing itself for targeted tarrifs in addition to those threatened against the European Union, after Donald Trump again singled out the US pharmaceutical sector in the country.
But business chiefs have warned that the uncertainty and Trump’s policy by press release and cycle of threat and cancellation of threat is going to see the US punished by investors and particularly bond holders.
“He is really putting the United States at risk primarily, and then by a knock on consequence the rest of the world,” said Danny McCoy, chief executive of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation.
He told RTE that while Trump may be trying to lure pharmaceutical giants back from Ireland and force the EU to buy more American cars through tariffs, the uncertainty was increasing the risk of investing in the US, something that would be translated into potential downgrading of its credit rating.
“The checks and balances that the United States have, even from their judiciary or from Congress just seem to be bypassed right now, and that’s not a good place for business … But I think [it is] outside, where he will get disciplined, in time, through the bond markets,” he said.
Trump claimed Ireland had stolen the US pharmaceutical sector when he met the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, earlier this month in the Oval Office. On Wednesday night, the US president returned to his threat to impose tariffs on medicines coming from Ireland.
“We’re going to be doing tariffs on pharma, in order to bring our pharma back, …. its in other countries, largely made in china, a lot of made it in Ireland. Ireland very smart, we love Ireland, but we’ll have that,” Trump said.
Ireland cannot retaliate but along with the EU it is hoping that in the weeks after his annoucenment and the introduction of counter tariffs in Europe a space will be created for negotiation.
Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Harris, said on Thursday the EU wanted to “sit down with the US and reach agreement on a trade relationship that works for everyone because trade is good for jobs, growth and all our economies”.
He will attend an emergency meeting of EU trade ministers on 7 April where tariffs will be central.
Joseph Gedeon
The Trump administration has terminated 69 international programs aimed at combating child labor, forced labor and human trafficking, potentially undermining decades of progress in protecting vulnerable workers globally.
The Washington Post obtained an email detailing how the US Department of Labor’s bureau of international labor affairs (ILAB) will immediately end grants totaling more than $500m that supported labor standard enforcement across 40 countries, including critical initiatives in Mexico, Central America, south-east Asia and Africa.
John Clark, a Trump-appointed official, in the email justified the cuts by citing a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest”.
The department’s spokesperson, Courtney Parella, echoed this sentiment, telling the Post that the administration wants to prioritize “investments in the American workforce”.
Full story:
Martin Pengelly
The Associated Press isn’t Donald Trump’s favorite news outlet, largely because it won’t play ball over his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Chances are his staff won’t be printing out and presenting its new story about an analysis of the likely effects of Trump’s tariffs policy on cities across America.
According to the AP, “The US cities most vulnerable to a trade war with Canada turn out to largely be in the states that helped return Donald Trump to the White House – a sign of the possible political risk he’s taking with his tariff plans.
A new analysis released Thursday by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce detailed the areas most dependent on exports to Canada, with San Antonio and Detroit topping the list of 41 US metro areas. The findings show that the United States’ 25% tariffs on Canada and Canada’s retaliations could inflict meaningful damage in key states for US politics.
“The analysis was conducted before the Republican president announced Wednesday that he was placing additional 25% tariffs on imported autos and parts starting on 3 April.
Candace Laing, president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, tells the AP: “The consequences of today’s escalation in this destructive tariff war will not be contained to Canada, as much as the US administration would like to pretend.
“Throwing away tens of thousands of jobs on both sides of the border will mean giving up North America’s auto leadership role, instead encouraging companies to build and hire anywhere else but here. This tax hike puts plants and workers at risk for generations, if not forever.”
More on Trump’s tariffs:
In lighter news, heavily armed Secret Service agents yesterday apprehended an intruder on White House grounds: a young child.
According to Tyler Smith, a video journalist on the scene, the kid “squeezed through the fence on the north lawn” before being “retrieved” and “brought back to his parents”.
A kid squeezed through the fence on the north lawn of the White House. Secret Service has retrieved him and brought him back to his parents. pic.twitter.com/42jpG1tF5w
— Tyler Smith (@tyler5mith) March 26, 2025
Robert Tait
Though exactly how Jeffrey Goldberg ended up on a Signal group chat to discuss what were meant to be secret plans to bomb Yemen remains a mystery, posterity may render it one of recent US history’s most serendipitous chance encounters.
Had the fates been conspiring to add a journalist to the forum whose presence would inflict the maximum discomfort to Trump and his circle, they could hardly have chosen a more fitting candidate.
Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, was already considered a bete noire by circles around Donald Trump even before Monday’s embarrassing revelation that he had been accidentally added to a chat that included the US defense secretary, the White House national security adviser and the heads of the country’s intelligence community.
At the same time Goldberg is also widely criticized by some on the left of US media and politics for his views on Israel, his past record serving in the Israeli military and his hawkish views on Iran and his support for the US invasion of Iraq.
However, since becoming the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief in 2016, he has built a track record of unearthing stories that have managed to specifically get under Trump’s skin with the type of journalism loathed by the president’s “Make America Great Again” (Maga) followers. That, coupled with seemingly acute embarrassment over the sensitivity of his disclosures, helps explain the animus displayed towards Goldberg by multiple administration officials and surrogates.
Full story:
The US Department of Justice has proposed merging the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Washington Post reports.
The Post said it obtained a memo proposing the move and other reforms. Unnamed justice department officials were said to have “stressed” that the DEA-ATF merger, like other reforms, was not a done deal.
Other possible reforms, the Post said, included transferring an office that deals with international law enforcement to the US marshals service.
“The memo does not detail how the changes would be implemented and what, if any, functions of the affected offices would be eliminated,” the Post said, on a day when elsewhere in the federal government, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced 10,000 layoffs, an approach consistent with the Trump administration’s brutal slashing of federal departments, under the eye of Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.
“Many of the proposals reflect the public priorities of the Trump administration,” the Post said about the justice department memo it obtained. “For example, the memo floats reducing the number of attorneys working on investigations and prosecutions related to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
