Lawsuit Filed Over The Bombing The Houthis Group Chat
from the someone-add-me-to-the-judicial-group-chat dept
If you’re going to plan military operations over Signal, you probably shouldn’t accidentally add a journalist to the chat. And if you’re going to do government business over Signal specifically to avoid federal record-keeping laws, you definitely shouldn’t get caught doing it. Yet here we are: A day after we learned that top Trump administration officials — including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, VP JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — were coordinating Yemen bombing plans over an unsecured Signal group chat (with bonus journalist Jeffrey Goldberg accidentally included), the first lawsuit has arrived.
The watchdog group American Oversight’s filing makes the obvious point: Using Signal to dodge the Federal Records Act’s requirements is, well, illegal. The law is quite clear about this:
To comply with the statute, the agency head “shall make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency and designed to furnish the information necessary to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.”
Each agency head is further required to establish a records management program providing “effective controls over the creation and over the maintenance and use of records,” id. § 3102(1), and to “establish safeguards against the removal or loss of records the head of [the] agency determines to be necessary and required by regulations of the Archivist,”
When records are handled in a manner that contravenes the FRA, or a parallel agency record-keeping policy, the FRA obligates the agency head to “notify the Archivist of any actual, impending, or threatened unlawful removal, defacing, alteration, corruption, deletion, erasure, or other destruction of records in the custody of the agency . . . .”
While there are multiple layers of problems here — from the careless handling of national security information to the sloppy inclusion of an outside journalist to the fundamental question of bombing people halfway across the world — the lawsuit zeros in on what appears to be a deliberate attempt to dodge accountability. Rather than using secure government systems that properly preserve records as required by law, this administration chose to conduct war planning over Signal — a choice that seems designed specifically to keep these discussions hidden from legally mandated record-keeping requirements.
Signal is not an authorized system for preserving federal records and does not comply with recordkeeping requirements under the FRA or NARA guidance
Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including, but not limited to, national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations.
This incident didn’t come as a complete surprise to American Oversight. The watchdog group has been trying to get access to administration Signal messages since January, having filed multiple FOIA requests specifically seeking both email and Signal discussions between various agencies and the White House. Those requests remain pending, but this accidental revelation suggests they were right to be concerned.
On January 28, 2025, American Oversight submitted a FOIA request to DoD (bearing American Oversight internal tracking number DOD-25-0183) seeking all records reflecting communications, expressly including Signal messages, between DoD officials, including Pete Hegseth, and anyone in the White House Office, containing one or more specified key terms, from January 20, 2025, through January 27, 2025. On January 28, 2025, DoD acknowledged the request and assigned it tacking number 25-F-2084. Upon information and belief, American Oversight’s request remains pending
And then there’s this simple fact: this Signal group chat only came to light through sheer incompetence. How many other potentially illegal chat groups exist where officials remembered to double-check their participant lists? As the filing notes:
Defendants’ use of Signal, as demonstrated by this particular example, presents a substantial risk that they have used and continue to use Signal in other contexts, thereby creating records that are subject to the FRA and/or the FOIA, but are not being preserved as required by those statutes.
Defendants’ use of Signal, as demonstrated by this particular example, strongly suggests that they have used Signal to communicate about matters that may otherwise have been discussed via email, thereby avoiding creating records responsive to American Oversight’s FOIA requests for emails.
Beyond just preserving these specific Signal messages, the lawsuit aims to stop this administration’s apparent pattern of using non-secure messaging apps to dodge their record-keeping obligations. Though given their demonstrated technical expertise so far, perhaps we should be grateful they’re not trying to conduct military operations via ExTwitter DMs.
Though, if they were doing that, perhaps we would have had Elon Musk leaking the messages himself.
Oh, and this morning the case got assigned to Judge Boasberg, who is already dealing with this administration’s nonsense regarding the rendition flights to El Salvador. So that should be fun.
Filed Under: federal records act, group chat, james boasberg, jd vance, marco rubio, pete hegseth
Comments on “Lawsuit Filed Over The Bombing The Houthis Group Chat”
Pretty sure that revealing why any of this happened would impact the president’s foreign policy goals and/or implicate some state secrets (which are unclassified, natch). Also, will no one rid Trump of this turbulent judge?
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Not Much Of A Plan
“No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans.”
Re:
you wrote “I can not read” incorrectly.
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Irrelevant, but then you are an expert in missing the forest for the trees with your childish illogic.
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So your contention is that it would have been fine to broadcast this information publicly in the run-up to the strike? Operational security wouldn’t have been affected if, say, Elon Musk just slapped it up on X?
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in the (almost) full chat log released today, which I have only reviewed excerpts from, name at least one target, the location the target would be in, and when the strike was planned were all published. WE are told one embedded intellegence operative (sources and methods) is identified in the full chat and is continuing to be witheld as it would implicate state secrets.
Your tune would be completely different if this log was published before the strikes, allowing the targets to escape.
Re: Re:
His tune would be completely different if this occurred under the Obama or Biden administrations. He’d be calling for public executions of the “traitors” who leaked sensitive information.
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For once, I’m “with Koby” on this one. Fuck journalistic decency. Everything should be released, down to classified data and troop movements. Make the military realize just how fucked they are with these bozos in charge.
At least then it’s a past military operation and not a future one being exposed to Russia/China/North Korea/etc., which will happen if these idiots are left to their own devices.
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Irrelevant. Also, you know no such thing.
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And yet when the non-classified information is demanded to be produced, Tulsi Gabbard refused to do so citing “National Security” (at least implied when not outright stated).
According to your post, nothing much is there, according to GaGa Gabbard, the princely jewels of Top Secret Information and classified techniques are rife and a trove for our enemies to plunder so she can’t hand it over, wetting her pants in panic at the simple thought of having to do so. Conveniently also overlooking the fact that Signal self deletes and government records keeping, even of the most classified subjects, require a record be kept. So no matter which way the flea jumps, laws were broken. Now I guess it will be “But but but HER EMAILS!” will be the refrain.
You know Kobe, I’m constantly and consistently amazed at your ability to reason like Gumby, twisting fact and evidence into shapes an origami expert marvels at. At times, I have to stop and remind myself you’re not actually a creation simply to boost engagement, it would seem you honestly hold the views you express here. That is as concerning as I find this administration which is willing to “deport”, imprison, even execute even it’s own citizens without due process of law.
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The information shared in an unsecured channel was absolutely enough info to completely wreck the mission. If I were a Houthi and knew that there were going to be F-18s attacking a Houthi target in 90 minutes, that would give me enough heads up to escape, or worse yet, shoot down the F-18s.
But, for you and for the Republican party, the priority is always going to be “make Dear Leader look good”, even if it costs American lives.
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Name of target nation and target group discussed March 13th 16:28
Reason for group discussed and timeline explained
17 people in group, on e
March 15th 08:05 …..Information on specific targets, weapons and attack sequencing.
Which bits are you struggling with?
Re: Re:
The bits that prove him a liar. He always runs away when he’s faced with the truth—or an argument he can’t counter.
🎵 Brave Sir Koby runs away, lives to fuck up another day
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See, there’s your problem(well, one of them), Koward: you go off someone else’s account of what happened instead of looking at the evidence for yourself. The Atlantic posted snippets of the chat today, and it contains all the things that the liars trying to downplay this said it doesn’t contain.
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A reminder that the journalist who was included in the discussion explicitly said he was leaving out a number of things shared in the chat that would have been dangerous to leak. He was only sharing the parts he felt comfortable with sharing.
That what we heard doesn’t include many details is entirely expected given this fact. It doesn’t mean more significant details were not in the conversation; we just aren’t privy to them.
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“My people are completely incompetent.” Is not the winning argument you think it is bro.
I’m glad it’s not assigned to a judge who would just immediately dismiss it as the American People having no standing to sue.
The Atlantic just published some of the chat
It includes times, deployments, battle damage assessment, identities of participants, message timestamps, etc. This is incredibly valuable information to any US adversary. This is the sort of intel that hostile foreign powers will kill to obtain. This is the sort of intel that people go to prison for leaking. This is the sort of intel that enemies can use not only to detect/thwart future attacks, but to target American military assets and personnel. And these utterly incompetent clowns not only used an unauthorized comms channel, they copied it all to a journalist.
They’ve handed a great victory to every current (and future) enemy of the US, including every terrorist organization with decent intel capabilities. This wasn’t a successful attack, it was a miserable failure.
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It can be seen on Wikipedia (in the screen shots).
But her emails!!!!
I don’t hear you “rule of law” mouth breathers ranting about this literal federal crime, which is so so so much worse.
You have no counterarguement. Your positions are logically inconsistent with themselves.
No. Just no.
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Your mistake is the same every liberal keeps making: Believing that fascists are actually unaware of how hypocritical they are and will suddenly change their behavior if it’s pointed out enough.
From CNN’s article Annotating the Trump administration’s Yemen war plans from their Signal group chat:
Micheal Waltz’s Contact List (“name” -> persons number):
You forgot Mike Waltz, who was responsible for the inclusion of the journalist in the Signal chat.