US president had previously called for the impeachment of James Boasberg after the judge blocked his deportation flights
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.
