A public interest law firm has filed a federal lawsuit against the participants in a Signal chat group discussion last month that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other White House officials regarding an imminent airstrike on Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen.
The lawsuit filed by the National Security Counselors requests the participants to turn over all conversations they had on the encrypted app over the past three months, The Hill reported Friday.
Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are named in the suit, which is seeking the totality of messages in their accounts “regardless of sender or recipient.”
“When news first broke about Signal-gate, the first question on a lot of national security people’s minds wasn’t, ‘How did this happen?’ We knew how it happened. Our question was, ‘How often did this happen?'” Kel McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, told The Hill.
It is the first legal action since Hegseth reportedly discussed the same strike in a Signal chat with his wife, brother and personal attorney. Hegseth reportedly said Tuesday that only “informal, unclassified coordinations” were shared in the chat.
Rubio, Ratcliffe and Gabbard were among those added to the initial Signal group chat, which became public last month when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, revealed he was mistakenly invited to join the group.
Hegseth insisted last month that no classified plans were shared in the initial group chat, telling reporters that Goldberg, who was inadvertently added by White House National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, released details that were not war plans.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, a Barack Obama appointee, reportedly said during a March 27 hearing in Washington, D.C., that he will issue a temporary restraining order barring administration officials from destroying messages sent over the app. A nonprofit watchdog, American Oversight, requested the order. A government attorney said the administration already was taking steps to collect and save the messages.
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