Participants on a Signal group chat discussion about a strike on Houthi targets in Yemen are facing a lawsuit over a request to turn over all conversions they had on the encrypted app over the past three months.
The suit is the first filed since reporting indicating Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth discussed the same strike in a Signal chat with his wife, brother and personal lawyer.
The suit asks for the Signal messages from Hegseth and other top Trump officials, asking for the totality of messages in their accounts “regardless of sender or recipient.”
“When news first broke about Signalgate, 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?’” said Kel McClanahan, executive director of the nonprofit National Security Counselors, who brought the suit after filing a similar public information request on behalf of a journalist.
“The heads of at least five of the most powerful agencies in the national security community were freely texting over an app that was not approved for sensitive communications and setting it to automatically delete everything they said. And since then we’ve learned that we were right to be worried, thanks to the news about Hegseth’s Signal chat with his wife and personal lawyer about bombing plans.”
The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are also named in the suit.
Offices for the other officials listed on the lawsuit did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The same figures are also in litigation with the group American Oversight, which argued the Signal chat, which had some messages set to automatically delete, violated public records laws and sought an order directing the government to preserve or recover any related records.
But the group said the messages appear to have been deleted from Ratcliffe’s phone, citing a declaration from Hurley Blankenship, the CIA’s chief data officer, who said that only “residual administrative content” remained visible in a screenshot but that the chat no longer showed “substantive messages from the Signal chat.”
When McClanahan filed his initial records request, he expressed concern officials may be regularly seeking to dodge public records laws by routinely discussing government business on Signal.
He also noted the ease of destroying those records.
“This administration has proven again and again that it is allergic to accountability and transparency,” he said, “and we are bringing this case to make sure that they can’t just put national security at risk for their own convenience and then destroy all the evidence afterwards.”
