(Pool via AP)
The same federal judge who has been publicly and vociferously criticized by President Donald Trump for rulings he didn’t like in an immigration case has now been assigned to preside over a new lawsuit filed regarding the shocking leak of a Signal group chat after a journalist was inadvertently added.
Trump has repeatedly railed against U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg this month, even going so far as to call for his impeachment after he temporarily ordered the Trump administration to stop deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The president’s attacks on Boasberg rose to a level that Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare statement rebuking Trump over his calls for Boasberg’s impeachment.
Meanwhile, the case has continued on, with the Trump administration on Monday citing the state secrets privilege to refuse to disclose to Boasberg information about the flights — a move that The New York Times’ Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage described as “sharply escalating[ing] the growing conflict between the administration and the judge — and, by extension, the federal judiciary — in a case that legal experts fear is precipitating a constitutional crisis.”
Also on Monday came a stunning report from Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, describing how National Security Adviser Mike Waltz had accidentally added him in a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal that included the “principals committee,” top level national security agency officials in President Donald Trump’s administration, as they discussed war plans and messaging strategies related to striking the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen earlier this month.
According to Goldberg’s bombshell report, besides Waltz the chat apparently included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, “and someone identified only as ‘S M,’ which I took to stand for [Homeland Security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff] Stephen Miller.”
In the article, Goldberg excoriated Waltz and the other participants in the chat for the “shocking recklessness of this Signal conversation” — and then followed up with a new article Wednesday morning that shared the attack plans Hegseth and others insisted were not in the group chat.
Tuesday evening, a lawsuit was filed by American Oversight, a liberal advocacy group, against five of the officials Goldberg named as being in the Signal chat: Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Bessent, and Rubio, as well as the National Archives and Records Administration.
The complaint seeks declaratory and injunctive relief against the defendants for their “failure to meet their obligations under the Federal Records Act,” specifically regarding the function on the Signal app to automatically delete messages, in order “to prevent the unlawful destruction of federal records and to compel Defendants to fulfill their legal obligations to preserve and recover federal records created through unauthorized use of Signal for sensitive national security decision-making.”
Wednesday morning, Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney tweeted an update in the American Oversight case. “JUST IN: Judge James Boasberg has been assigned to the Signalgate lawsuit,” he wrote, along with a screenshot from the case docket.
“You really can’t script this,” Cheney added in a subsequent tweet. “The same week the Trump admin invokes the state secrets privilege to deny Boasberg info, he is assigned the lawsuit over the Trump administration’s apparent carelessness with state secrets.”
The post Judge Trump Said Should Be Impeached for Suspending Deportations Just Got Assigned to New Signal Chat Lawsuit first appeared on Mediaite.
