Left: United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio is seen in the Department of State building in Washington DC on Friday, June 20, 2025 (Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA – via AP Images) Right: Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg (U.S. District Courts) Inset: President Donald Trump talks with reporters in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, June 18, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
A federal judge has ordered acting United States Archivist Marco Rubio to transfer messages from the Signal group chat scandal to the Department of Justice so they can be reviewed and preserved.
A lawsuit was brought by American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, after journalist Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he had been inadvertently added to a messaging chain among top Trump administration national security officials planning a strike against the Yemen-based Houthis.
The national security breach, especially to a journalist President Donald Trump has long condemned, ignited a firestorm of controversy. And groups such as American Oversight demanded the communications be preserved.
The organization, in its lawsuit against administration officials, requested a preliminary injunction to force the administration to update its record keeping policies, notify Rubio in his capacity as archivist of its “unlawful records deletion,” preserve all messages while the lawsuit plays out, and order Rubio to request that Attorney General Pam Bondi recover messages that had been deleted.
Boasberg, however, found that most of these requests were impossible — and instead he granted much narrower relief.
“[The court] concludes that Plaintiff has not shown that the agencies” recordkeeping programs are inadequate, that this Court can provide redress for already-deleted messages, or that record preservation is an available remedy in [Administrative Procedure Act] suits for [Federal Records Act] violations,” Boasberg, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote.
“American Oversight has likely established, conversely, that notification of the Archivist and referral to the Attorney General as to not-yet-deleted communications are mandatory, and that ordering those modest actions is justified under the preliminary-injunction factors,” the Washington, D.C.-based district judge added.
Still, while the judge determined he could do nothing about Signal messages that had already been deleted, Boasberg maintained top government officials have failed to do their jobs.
“[T]he Court concludes that Plaintiff is likely to succeed in showing that there are FRA-noncompliant Signal chats, that agency-head Defendants have not fulfilled their mandatory duty to notify Rubio of their existence, and that Rubio has likewise neglected to fulfill his duty to ask the Attorney General to ensure the preservation of the messages contained therein,” Boasberg wrote.
As the judge noted, administration officials have argued that regardless of the plaintiff’s claims regarding their obligations, the Signal messages were set to be auto-deleted and are thus not recoverable. The judge found merit to this assessment, pointing to American Oversight’s past endorsement of the encrypted messaging platform’s own representations.
“To be sure, it may in fact be the case that a Signal message is somehow recoverable even if it appears deleted from the app,” Boasberg wrote. “But American Oversight has taken the opposite position, endorsing the representations made by Signal as a basis to argue that because there is no back-end means of preserving Signal communications, the watchdog faces irreparable harm.”
“The Court therefore cannot conclude that American Oversight’s request for communications that have already fallen victim to Signal’s auto-delete function remains redressable given Plaintiff’s own representations to the contrary,” he added.
Still, communications that “are not yet gone with the wind” face no such issues, Boasberg maintained. And, “Because the looming erasure of automatically deleting Signal messages qualifies as such an imminent destruction of records, and because the Attorney General could prevent that destruction by instructing Government officials to halt the messages’ deletion, it remains possible for the Court to provide relief.”
Rubio, whose principal job is as secretary of state, has been tasked with wearing other hats in the Trump administration. In the fallout of the Signal debacle, then-national security advisor Mike Waltz — who admitted to creating the chat and accidentally adding Goldberg — was booted from his post.
The man tasked with replacing him? Rubio.
In addition to leading the State Department and serving as acting archivist, the former senator has also served as acting administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, an agency the administration has sought to significantly scale down.
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, suggested their legal action would halt following Boasberg’s order — so long as the administration follows it.
“We expect immediate compliance — and if they drag their feet or fail to act, we are fully prepared to pursue further legal action to ensure government records, which belong to the public, are preserved and protected,” Chukwu said, per NPR.
The Signal group chat leak remains perhaps the most controversial incident of Trump’s second administration. Critics used it as an illustration of top Cabinet officials’ inexperience and warned of the dangers had the information been leaked to a foreign enemy rather than a U.S. journalist.
As the White House suggests war in the Middle East is possible, the so-called “Signalgate” looms large over what may transpire.
