A US JUDGE has ordered the Trump administration to preserve messages from a Signal chat group used by the US President’s top national security officials to discuss plans for an attack on Yemen.

The ruling adds to the pressure on the White House after the Atlantic magazine revealed that its editor had been accidentally added to the group on the commercially-available Signal app.

District Judge James Boasberg – who has already incurred Trump’s wrath after ruling against the administration in a separate migration case – said he would order the government to “preserve all Signal communication between 11 March and 15 March.”

He also ordered the government to file details by Monday showing the steps it had taken to preserve the messages.

The scandal has rocked Donald Trump’s administration, with senior Republican and Democratic senators calling for an investigation into the breach.

But the White House has reacted defiantly by denying any wrongdoing and attacking journalist and editor of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently added to the group chat. 

US National Security adviser Michael Waltz has admitted being responsible for Goldberg being added to the group chat, titled “Houthi PC small group”. 

“PC” refers to “Principals Committee”, a group of the highest-ranking national security officials. Goldberg said he has no idea how or why he was added to the group.

The journalist said Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth sent information in the Signal chat, which also included US Vice President JD Vance and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, right ahead of strikes against the Houthi rebels in Yemen on 15 March.

The White House launched a coordinated attack in which it slammed the magazine’s journalists as “scumbags” and dismissed the story as a “hoax”, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stating that “there was no classified information transmitted in the group chat”.

On Wednesday, The Atlantic published the entire text of the chat group, citing “assertions made by numerous administration officials that we are lying about the content of the Signal texts”.

The details were all laid out in screenshots of the chat, including Hegseth laying out the weather conditions, the times that the attacks would take place and the types of aircraft being used. 

The texting was done barely half an hour before the first US warplanes took off and two hours before the first target, described as “Target Terrorist,” was expected to be bombed.

The Atlantic initially did not publish the precise details of the chat, saying it wanted to avoid revealing classified material and information that could endanger American troops, including the name of a CIA intelligence officer. 

Its publication on Wednesday included everything in the Signal chain other than that one CIA name.

Calls for investigation

Democrats have claimed that the lives of US service members could have been put at risk by the breach, and the row has raised serious questions about potential intelligence risks.

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Republican Senator Roger Wicker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and ranking Democrat Jack Reed have written to the Pentagon’s acting inspector general asking it to “conduct an inquiry” into the incident.

In their letter, Wicker and Reed asked the watchdog to look into the “facts and circumstances,” whether classified material was shared, and the security of communications.

“If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information,” they said of The Atlantic’s story about the chat.

Wicker said on Wednesday that the information shared in the chat “appears to me to be of such a sensitive nature that based on my knowledge, I would have wanted it classified.”

But speaking today, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the breach was unlikely to face a criminal investigation.

“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released, and what we should be talking about is that it was a very successful mission,” Bondi told a news conference.

With reporting from © AFP 2025