A public watchdog group sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a slew of other Trump administration officials Tuesday after a journalist revealed he was inadvertently added to a text chain discussing U.S. war plans.
The lawsuit, brought by the watchdog group American Oversight and first reported by HuffPost, requests that a federal judge formally declare that Hegseth and other officials on the chat violated their duty to uphold laws around the preservation of official communications. Those laws are outlined in the Federal Records Act and, according to lawyers for American Oversight, if agency heads refuse to recover or protect their communications, the national archivist should ask the attorney general to step in.
On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg reported that national security adviser Michael Waltz inadvertently added him to a Signal group chat with more than a dozen Trump administration officials and aides including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, homeland security adviser Stephen Miller and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. CIA Director John Ratcliffe told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday that he was also in the Signal chat. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would not admit whether she was a participant, though Goldberg reported she was; instead, she said the matter was “still under review.”
As American Oversight lawyers pointed out in their lawsuit Tuesday, Rubio is also the acting archivist of the United States and, as such, “is aware of the violations” that allegedly occurred.
He is also “responsible for initiating an investigation through the Attorney General for the recovery of records or other redress,” the lawsuit said.
Goldberg’s article only shared a portion of the messages he received over two days. Most of the texts were “procedural” and “policy” talk, he wrote, but that changed on March 15.
The longtime journalist said Hegseth began to post “war plans” and discussed targets, weapons and other tactics, like attack sequencing, for a U.S. strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The specific details of the strike plans on March 15 were excluded from Goldberg’s report because he felt that “the information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East.”
Hegseth has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and denied that war plans or classified information was shared with the reporter. However, the text chain, according to Goldberg, appears to undercut the defense secretary’s claim: At one point before the attack in Yemen, Hegseth proclaimed to Goldberg and other members in the chat that they were “currently clean on OPSEC,” shorthand for operational security.
On Monday, the National Security Council said the message thread “appears to be authentic.”
American Oversight executive director Chioma Chukwu said the Atlantic report was deeply troubling on several levels.
For one, it was reported that Waltz set up a feature to automatically delete some of the texts in the group chat. They were reportedly set to vanish after one week and, in some instances, four weeks.
The auto-delete feature is a commonly used function on Signal, but it is not a default; a user must turn it on. The app is end-to-end encrypted, which offers slightly more protection than a typical texting app. Signal does not automatically archive conversations, either.
Government workers are allowed to use the app to communicate, but they are not supposed to use it to discuss classified or secret information.
The Federal Records Act also specifically imposes a duty on agency heads to “make and preserve records containing adequate and proper documentation of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, and essential transactions of the agency,” the lawsuit notes.
That means whether conversations on Signal were classified or not, there must be a records management system in place. And one that retains those records for up to two years, as the National Archives and Records Administration requires.
“What the Trump administration did was simply dangerous, reckless and irresponsible and frankly, a direct threat to our national security because we know, as has been reported, that increasingly state-backed hackers are trying to find their ways into Signal chats,” Chukwu said. “With foreign state actors who can remotely compromise Trump administration officials’ phones, then every so-called ‘secure’ Signal message could be an open book to our adversaries.”
Just a week ago, the Pentagon issued a warning to all Defense Department employees about Signal, saying that a “vulnerability” had been identified in the app.
NPR reported that the Pentagon memo warned that “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.” In that same alert issued on March 18, the Pentagon highlighted that while third-party messaging apps like Signal are “permitted by policy for unclassified accountability/recall exercises,” they are “not approved to process or store non-public unclassified information.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the White House is investigating how Goldberg was added to the thread.
The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment on Tuesday.
Chukwu said the public must continue to demand answers and transparency from the administration.
“People shouldn’t feel this is an exercise in futility. The administration would be much further along on its destructive path if it weren’t for the public protesting … and demanding accountability from their elected officials. They must continue to do that. Otherwise this information will be lost from the American people,” she said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.