The US judge set to hear a new lawsuit over the Signal fiasco is the same judge whom Donald Trump has argued should be impeached for blocking him from using wartime powers to deport Venezuelan migrants.
James Boasberg, a district judge in Washington, was assigned on Wednesday to a lawsuit alleging Trump officials violated federal record-keeping laws by using a Signal group chat to discuss looming military action against Yemen’s Houthis.
The Atlantic magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently included in the chat, has reported that the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, texted the start time for the planned killing of a Houthi militant in Yemen on 15 March along with details of further US airstrikes.
The revelation that highly sensitive attack plans were shared on a commercial messaging app, possibly on personal mobile phones, has triggered outrage in Washington and calls from Democrats that members of Trump’s national security team be fired.
The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by a liberal-leaning government watchdog group, American Oversight, which argued that officials failed to implement measures to prevent the automatic deletion of messages in the Signal chat, in violation of their duties under the Federal Records Act.
The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring their actions unlawful and an injunction requiring Hegseth and other Trump administration officials to preserve records and recover any deleted materials to the extent possible.
The administration has not responded to the lawsuit. But officials have said no classified information was shared on Signal, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called an approved app loaded on to government phones at the Pentagon, Department of State and Central Intelligence Agency.
The case was assigned to Boasberg, the chief judge of the US district court for the District of Columbia, through the court’s usual random assignment process, a court spokesperson said.
The White House and US Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
Boasberg has been at the centre of an escalating dispute with the Trump administration which has raised concerns among the president’s critics about a potentially looming constitutional crisis if the administration defies judicial decisions.
The judge last week instructed justice department lawyers to give him a justification for the administration’s failure to return the flights carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members deported to El Salvador on 15 March despite his order blocking such deportations for two weeks.
The administration has said the deportations were carried out under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Justice department lawyers on Tuesday reiterated their position that the flights did not violate Boasberg’s order.
Trump last week called for Boasberg’s impeachment. That prompted a rare rebuke from the US supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts, who said in a statement that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”, which can be appealed.
Republican lawmakers have filed resolutions seeking the impeachment of Boasberg and five other judges who have stymied Trump’s agenda, as the White House has continued to ramp up attacks on the judiciary.
