Lawsuit Filed Over The Bombing The Houthis Group Chat
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.