Judge orders Trump team to save ‘Signalgate’ chats; Putin threatens Arctic war
The federal judge overseeing the lawsuit over the White House Signal chat scandal has ordered the messages be preserved after Donald Trump called him “disgraceful”. Follow updates.
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A US judge ordered Donald Trump’s administration to preserve messages from a chat group used by top national security officials to discuss plans for an attack on Yemen’s Huthi rebels.
The ruling adds to the pressure on the White House after the Atlantic magazine revealed that its editor had been accidentally added to the group on the commercially-available Signal app.
Republican Trump has dismissed the scandal as a “witch-hunt” while attacking the Atlantic and its editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who broke the story earlier this week.
Watchdog group American Oversight sued Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials following the The Atlantic report.
American Oversight’s lawsuit seeks to “prevent the unlawful destruction of federal records and to compel Defendants to fulfill their legal obligations to preserve and recover federal records created through unauthorised use of Signal for sensitive national security decision-making,” according to the group’s legal complaint filed on Tuesday.
District Judge James Boasberg – who has already incurred Mr Trump’s wrath after ruling against the administration in a separate migration case – said he would order the government to “preserve all Signal communication between March 11 and March 15.” He also ordered the government to file details by Monday showing the steps it had taken to preserve the messages.
The dates cover the period between when National Security Adviser Mike Waltz set up the chat – and mistakenly added Goldberg – and the day of deadly US air strikes on the Iran-backed Huthis.
The Atlantic said that Waltz had set some of the Signal messages to disappear after one week, and others after four.
“That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law,” Goldberg wrote.
The magazine published the full chat on Wednesday, including sensational messages in which Hegseth revealed the timings of strikes hours before they happened and details of planes and missiles used.
Waltz sent real-time intelligence on the aftermath of an attack, writing that US forces had identified the target “walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”
Mr Trump has largely pinned the blame on Waltz – saying he had admitted he was “responsible” – while denying that any classified material was shared in the group.
But he has also dismissed calls by Democrats for top officials to resign and insisted instead on what he called the success of the raids on the Yemeni rebels.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Thursday that the breach was unlikely to face a criminal investigation.
“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released, and what we should be talking about is that it was a very successful mission,” Bondi told a news conference.
Earlier, President Trump took to Truth Social to take aim at Judge Boasberg in a lengthy post.
“How disgraceful is it that ‘Judge’ James Boasberg has just been given a fourth ‘Trump Case,’ something which is, statistically, IMPOSSIBLE. There is no way for a Republican, especially a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, to win before him. He is Highly Conflicted, not only in his hatred of me — Massive Trump Derangement Syndrome!— but also, because of disqualifying family conflicts,” Mr Trump wrote in a 1am post on Thursday.
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PUTIN THREATENS ‘ARCTIC WAR’
Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is threatening an Arctic war as tensions grow ahead of US Vice President JD Vance’s visit to Greenland.
“We are talking about serious plans on the American side with regard to Greenland. These plans have longstanding historical roots,” Mr Putin told an Arctic forum in the northern city of Murmansk.
“This may surprise some, only at first glance,” he said. “It is a profound mistake to believe that these are some kind of extravagant talks of the new American administration. Nothing of the sort.”
Mr Putin said Russia will station more military personnel in the Arctic region and defend its interests in the region amid Donald Trump’s repeated desire to absorb the autonomous Danish island.
Mr Putin said he believed that “NATO countries in general are increasingly designating the Far North as a springboard for possible conflicts.”
Vance is set to visit Greenland with his wife Usha on Friday, local time, following threats from Mr Trump to take the island over.
Ahead of the visit, the Vice President said, “Speaking for President Trump, we want to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland because we think it’s important to protecting the security of the entire world.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SLASHES HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
The United States health department will slash 10,000 employees from its workforce as part of a dramatic restructure under new health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The cuts are in addition to about 10,000 positions already axed from the service, which will bring the workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 full time employees.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Mr Kennedy said in a statement announcing the plans.
“We are realigning the organisation with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.
“This Department will do more – a lot more – at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services said the cuts would save taxpayers about $US1.8 billion a year and insisted the changes would not impact critical services.
The health department’s 28 divisions will be consolidates into 15, including a new division for the Administration for a Healthy America
“Third, the overhaul will implement the new HHS priority of ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins,” the government announcement said.
“Finally, the restructuring will improve Americans’ experience with HHS by making the agency more responsive and efficient, while ensuring that Medicare, Medicaid, and other essential health services remain intact.”
TRUMP’S NEW TIKTOK MOVE
Donald Trump said that he may offer to reduce tariffs on China to get Beijing’s approval for the sale of popular social media platform TikTok.
“Maybe I give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” he told reporters at the White House.
The long-awaited deal to save TikTok from being banned from US app stores is ticking down to completion, On The Money has learned.
An investor group working with Vice President JD Vance has the contours of a deal in place to rescue the popular short video app from extinction, sources close to the situation said.
Vance is Trump’s White House point-man in saving TikTok from a ban that under law is set to go into effect April 5 if the app doesn’t divest from its Chinese ownership over concerns that the ruling communist party uses the platform to spy on US citizens.
The deal announcement will also likely include a grace period of some type – 30 days or possibly longer – for the team to iron out details, the source said.
Under the scenario now being discussed, tech giant Oracle would safeguard the app in its cloud, while TikTok’s Chinese-parent ByteDance would take a minority position in a new US majority-owned company, people with direct knowledge of the deal making said.
Large US-based institutions that already have an ownership stake in ByteDance, outfits like General Atlantic and Susquehanna, will form the majority of the ownership team, a move designed to address the US-control stipulations in the law, the sources added.
“We feel good we can get this thing done next week,” said a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations.
TikTok had no comment.
The way the TikTok ban law – signed by former President Biden and upheld by the Supreme Court — is written, the company must remove any trace of Chinese control.
Donald Trump has some discretion in determining if any deal meets those requirements.
TikTok is a private company, but it’s also enormously popular, with its US app garnering around 170 million users.
Deal team members say the new company could be worth anywhere from US$20 billion to $40 billion or more.
Still, it’s hard to value given the controversy surrounding the company and charges that it is used as an espionage tool of the communist Chinese government — an accusation that TikTok and ByteDance have long denied.
Another complicating matter is the deal’s current structure that includes TikTok’s current Chinese-made algorithm, the technology that gives the app its secret sauce of providing an endless supply of user videos based on personal preferences, but critics say, is also the tool used by the Chinese government to engage in espionage.
Some of the new equity investors have discussed a White House indemnification over this liability because of the existence of the Chinese ago and its potential legal ramifications. Others say the new ownership team will eventually have to create their own algorithm to stay within the law’s parameters.
TikTok’s emergence as among the most popular social media platforms, mostly with the youth of America, has been haunting Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington for more than five years.
Mr Trump once sought to ban the app but did a 180 after the recent election and said he wanted to preserve it.
He believes that during the 2024 presidential campaign, enough pro-Trump videos surfaced on the app that it helped him win votes in the 18 to 24 crowd that dominates its user base.
– with AFP and The New York Post
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Originally published as Judge orders Trump team to save ‘Signalgate’ chats; Putin threatens Arctic war
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