District Court Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg continues to be a pain in President Donald Trump’s side.
During a hearing Thursday Boasberg—the same judge overseeing a challenge to the Trump administration’s deportation of suspected Venezuelan gang members—ruled that officials caught up in the Signal group chat scandal must cough up all of the texts they sent on the encrypted messaging app between March 11 and March 15.
He then took the time to rebuff Trump’s claims, made in a furious Truth Social rant this week, that it was mathematically impossible for him to have drawn both cases. “statistically IMPOSSIBLE,” Trump wrote.
During the contentious hearing, Boasberg slowly but deliberately outlined the district court’s case assignment system, in which cases are randomly selected for a total of 24 judges, according to an account of the hearing in The New York Times.
It was a clear acknowledgement of the president’s attacks, the first he has made publicly.
The dates Boasberg’s ruling outlined correspond to the days that top Trump administration officials—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and National Security Adviser Mike Walz—discussed an attack on Yemen in a Signal group chat that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. The security breach has dominated the news since the story broke on Monday.
Boasberg’s order came in response to a lawsuit filed by watchdog group American Oversight against Trump’s security team that alleges that the administration violated the Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act by using Signal, which allows users to auto-delete messages, to share information that could not be stored and shared with the public in the future.
The Trump officials subject to Boasberg’s order include Hegseth, Gabbard, Ratcliffe, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
Boasberg’s order may be difficult for the administration to comply with. A screenshot of their chat published by The Atlantic on Wednesday showed that Waltz, who created the group, had set messages to disappear after a week.
Members of the group, as well as the White House itself, have downplayed the scandal and asserted none of the texts published by The Atlantic were classified. Hegseth has gone as far as calling the ordeal a “hoax,” while Trump has called it a “witch hunt.”
Boasberg, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, recently ruled against the Trump administration in another case involving the president’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua without questioning.
Trump called for Boasberg to be impeached after a March 15 ruling halting the deportations, which the administration has been accused of violating.
