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.
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Key events
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.
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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.
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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
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:
