Signal group chat leak: judge orders Trump administration to preserve all messages from 11-15 March – live

Deportations case judge assigned to Signal leak case orders all group messages must be preserved

James Boasberg, the judge Donald Trump says should be impeached over his handling of court proceedings regarding Trump’s hardline immigration policy, is currently conducting a hearing in a lawsuit filed over “Signalgate.”

Trump complained about Boasberg earlier today, posting a long rant in which he called Boasberg’s assignment “disgraceful” and implied it was rigged against him.

“Boasberg, who is the Chief Judge of the DC District Court, seems to be grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself, even though it is not supposed to happen that way,” Trump wrote, adding: “The good news is that it probably doesn’t matter, because it is virtually impossible for me to get an Honest Ruling in D.C. Our Nation’s Courts are broken, with New York and D.C. being the most preeminent of all in their Corruption and Radicalism. There must be an immediate investigation of this Rigged System, before it is too late!”

Now, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports that Boasberg felt obliged to begin his Thursday hearing with “a detailed explanation of the random case assignment process, emphasizing that he did not ask for or somehow proactively get this case”.

Boasberg has also “ordered the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.

A reminder, if it could possibly be needed: “Signalgate” refers to a group chat about airstrikes in Yemen, between top national security advisers and containing national security information, to which national security adviser Mike Waltz apparently inadvertently added Jeffery Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

More, from Hugo Lowell:

Key events

Closing summary

As another day of live coverage draws to a close, here are some of the day’s developments:

Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.
Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.
Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.
Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.
Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.
A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine.

Russian scientist who protested Putin before moving to US detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia

A Russian scientist from Harvard Medical School has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to her friends and colleagues.

On Wednesday, Cora Anderson, who works with the Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova, shared the news of Petrova’s detention on Facebook, saying the Russian scientist arrived at Boston Logan international airport on 16 February from a trip to France when she was stopped by US authorities.

According to Anderson, authorities revoked Petrova’s visa and told her that she was to be deported to Russia. In response, Petrova said that she feared political persecution and was instead sent by authorities to a detention facility, Anderson said.

“We had no idea initially what had happened to her since she was unable to send any messages or make any calls upon detention. She was moved to a facility in Vermont at first and then Louisiana where she is now. Where she is now is a jail that has space rented by ICE and is kept in a room with over 80 other female detainees,” Anderson wrote in her Facebook post.

“Despite having lawyers and the fact she did not do anything illegal in the first place, she is still there, and we have no idea when she will be paroled (or released, however simply released is unlikely),” she added.

Petrova’s boss, Leon Peshkin, said in an interview on Thursday that the researcher had good reason to fear being returned to Russia, because she had publicly protested the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its first days, called for the impeachment of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and was arrested. She managed to flee, first to the former Soviet republic of Georgia and then to the United States, to continue her research on genomes.

Peshkin said that Petrova was a highly skilled researcher, “she is spectacular, the best I’ve ever seen in 20 years at Harvard,” and had a visa that enabled her to work in the US and travel abroad freely. In February, however, when she was in Paris on vacation, her boss “made a huge mistake”. He asked her to pick up a box of frog embryo samples from colleagues in France and bring them back to the lab at Harvard.

The import of these samples, Peshkin said, was legal, but Petrova made some sort of paperwork mistake on the US customs declaration form and was stopped by customs officers on her return to Logan airport in Boston.

Although the legal penalty for improperly importing this non-toxic, non-hazardous frog material is simply a fine of up to $500, Peshkin said, immigration officers decided to deny Petrova re-entry to the US. When she informed the authorities of her very real fear of being jailed for protesting Putin’s war on Ukraine should she be returned to Russia, “she was transferred to Ice, into detention, to wait for an asylum hearing”, Peshkin said.

Petrova should be eligible for parole while she waits for that hearing, Peshkin said, “but paroles are now not happening”.

A GoFundMe page set up by Anderson for Petrova said that the researcher was hired to work for Harvard Medical School and had entered the US on a work visa. Anderson did not specify which work visa category Petrova was under. She said that Petrova is “supported in applying for a new visa” but added that it is a “multi-month process during which she will not be able to work thus not collect a paycheck”.

Reports of Petrova’s detention come just weeks after a French scientist was denied entry in the US this month after US immigration officers searched his phone and found messages critical of Donald Trump.

But Petrova’s boss told the Guardian that she does not seem to have had her visa revoked over any type of protest activity in the US. She never protested against Trump or in support of Palestinians under siege in Gaza, Peshkin said. But her Facebook messages denouncing Putin, and supporting the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Yashin, are still online.

Susan Collins accuses Trump of illegally refusing to spend $2.9bn appropriated by Congress

On the same day that Elon Musk told Fox that “we try to keep Congress informed” on his team’s efforts to slash federal spending, Senators Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, sent a letter to the White House accusing the president of illegally refusing to spend $2.9bn already appropriated by Congress.

In the letter, Collins, chair of the Senate appropriations committee, and Murray, its senior Democrat, contested Trump’s authority to not spend billions of dollars in the emergency budget bill Congress approved last week to avert a government shutdown.

The letter, to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is in response to a memo Trump issued to Congress at Vought’s urging in which he said that he did not concur with Congress’s emergency designations for 11 specific appropriations.

But the law, the senators write, gives “the President a binary choice: He must concur with all or none of Congress’s emergency designations. Just as the President does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate.”

It is, the senators write, “incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written – not as we would like it to be”.

The White House says that Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

The order also directs the interior secretary to restore federal monuments and statues that have been removed or changed in the past five years “to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events”.

The title of the order, “President Donald J Trump Restores Truth and Sanity to American History”, oddly echoes the 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the National Mall in Washington.

Fox interviews Musk on ‘fake White House set’ Trump aides mocked Biden for using

When Elon Musk sat down today, with a team of aides, for a friendly interview with Bret Baier of Fox, billed as an “unprecedented peek behind the curtain of Trump’s cost-cutting department”, there was something uncanny about the set, which was a sort of mock White House created on a soundstage.

The backdrop, with new wood panelling, purple lights strips and a bright White House seal, was probably familiar to Fox viewers because it was the “fake White House set” Donald Trump’s aides had spent years mocking Joe Biden for creating to host televised events. The set is in an auditorium of the Eisenhower executive office building, across from the White House, that presidents have used for years.

Just two weeks ago, Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer and his new interim US attorney for the district of New Jersey, recorded a social media video to boast that she had discovered “Biden’s fake Oval Office”.

An internal White House document obtained by the Washington Post indicates that the Trump administration plans sweeping job cuts across federal agencies between 8 and 50% of their employees in the first phase of its push to shrink the federal government.

“The details are compiled from plans that President Donald Trump ordered agencies to submit, according to two people familiar with the document”, the Post reports.

The document outlines layoffs of nearly half the 8,300-person staff of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, nearly one in four of the workers at the Interior Department and nearly one in three IRS workers, 8% of the workforce at the justice department 28% at the National Science Foundation, 30% at the commerce department and 43% at the Small Business Administration.

Justice department civil rights division investigates Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA to root out ‘DEI discrimination’

Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi announced on Thursday that she has directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using what she called “illegal DEI policies” to select students from diverse backgrounds.

“Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellow of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181 (2023), colleges and universities are prohibited from using DEI discrimination in selecting students for admission, and the Department of Justice is demanding compliance” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.

“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” said Bondi.

As we reported last month, a group co-founded by a professor of law at UCLA to fight what he calls the covert use of affirmative action in admissions decisions by colleges in the University of California system filed a lawsuit, aiming for an injunction to prohibit any consideration of race in student admissions.

‘We try to keep Congress informed’, Musk tells Fox of cuts made by his team

In an interview with Fox, Elon Musk and members of his so-called “department of government efficiency” team defended their role in making sweeping cuts to spending by federal agencies that has been legally appropriated by Congress.

“But the process still involves Congress, right, at some level?” the Fox host Bret Baier asked.

“We try to keep Congress as informed as possible. But the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly; it should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully”, Musk said. “It’s not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud, it is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress”.

Baier, a former golfing partner of Donald Trump, did not press Musk to explain why his team has repeatedly failed to uncover fraudulent spending, instead pointing again and again to spending that he and other Republicans disagree with, but was lawfully appropriated by Congress.

“Usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics”, Musk then claimed, falsely. “We are like well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can’t point to any”.

In fact, journalists have repeatedly discovered that specific items identified by Musk’s team as supposed waste or fraud, starting with the false claim that $50m was budgeted to send condoms to Gaza, were either mischaracterized, exaggerated or entirely invented.

A man was scheduled to appear in court in Las Vegas today, charged in relation to acts of vandalism in which Tesla cars were set on fire with molotov cocktails.

Attacks on Teslas and Tesla dealerships have been reported in relation to Tesla owner Elon Musk’s work for Donald Trump, overseeing brutal cuts to federal government staffing and budgets carried out by the so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge.

The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that “Paul Hyon Kim, 36, was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on Wednesday on a total of 15 counts, including suspicion of arson, destroying or injure real or personal property of another, value $5,000 or greater, possessing/disposing of a fire device, all felonies, and misdemeanor discharging a firearm into a vehicle”.

Kim is also facing “facing federal charges of unlawful possession of an unregistered firearm (destructive device) and arson, according to court records”, the paper said.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has promised harsh treatment for anyone found guilty of vandalizing Teslas and Tesla properties, calling such attacks “nothing short of domestic terrorism”.

Las Vegas law enforcement posited “very loose” ties between Kim and leftwing groups but said investigations continued.

Marina Dunbar

Two Democratic commissioners fired by Donald Trump from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit on Thursday to challenge their “indefensible” terminations.

Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, whose controversial firings were announced last week, are suing the Trump administration for “unlawfully” removing them from their positions.

“The President’s action is indefensible under governing law,” the complaint, obtained by the Guardian, states. The firings should be legally declared “unlawful and ineffective”, it argues, adding that the court should formally instruct the FTC’s leadership to allow Slaughter and Bedoya to serve out the remainder of their terms.

Under the FTC Act, a commissioner can only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. The act also says that no more than three of the FTC’s five commissioners can be of the same political party. After the terminations, the FTC currently holds a 3–0 Republican majority.

“The president’s attempt to terminate commissioners Bedoya and Slaughter is contrary to federal law and nearly a century of supreme court precedent,” said Amit Agarwal, special counsel for Protect Democracy, which is representing Slaughter and Bedoya in the lawsuit.

“This isn’t about Democrats versus Republicans or liberals versus conservatives – it’s about an economy governed by laws rather than political whims.”

Full story:

Marina Dunbar

The US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth – a central figure in the “Signalgate” scandal – has a tattoo that appears to read “infidel” or “non-believer” in Arabic, according to photos on his social media account.

In photos posted on Tuesday on X, the former Fox News host had what appears to be a tattoo that says “kafir”, an Arabic term used within Islam to describe an unbeliever. Hegseth appears to have also had the tattoo in another Instagram photo posted in July 2024.

Some people on social media criticized Hegseth for getting a tattoo that could be considered offensive to Muslims, especially as the US military seeks to represent a diverse pool of faiths. It is estimated that upwards of 5,000 to 6,000 US military members practice Islam.

“This isn’t just a personal choice; it’s a clear symbol of Islamophobia from the man overseeing US wars,” posted Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist in New York.

The “Signalgate” lawsuit heard by Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC this afternoon was filed by American Oversight, an independent advocacy group.

The group said its motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) sought to force the Trump administration “to immediately halt any further destruction of critically important federal records regarding the administration’s use of Signal to discuss military planning”, which key figures did in regard to airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, only for national security adviser Mike Waltz to add a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, to the high-level chat.

“The motion asks the court to order the defendants, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State and acting Archivist Marco Rubio, to comply with their mandatory obligations under the Federal Records Act.”

Bizarre as it may sound, Rubio is indeed the acting national archivist – as well as secretary of state and head of USAid.

As reported by Politico, Judge Boasberg this afternoon granted the TRO, “order[ing] the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.

Chioma Chukwu, interim executive director of American Oversight, said: “Using disappearing messaging apps to plan highly sensitive military operations isn’t just a transparency problem – it’s a national security crisis and potentially criminal.

“These officials chose platforms specifically designed to leave no paper trail for decisions that could cost lives and impact global stability.”

Deportations case judge assigned to Signal leak case orders all group messages must be preserved

Trump complained about Boasberg earlier today, posting a long rant in which he called Boasberg’s assignment “disgraceful” and implied it was rigged against him.

Boasberg has also “ordered the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.

More, from Hugo Lowell: