(WASHINGTON) — Five Cabinet members are facing a federal lawsuit over the use of Signal to coordinate military strikes in Yemen, with the case presided over by the same judge handling the case against the Trump administration over its deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg is overseeing the deportation case, which has led the White House to publicly attack him and call for his impeachment. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt has called him a “Democrat activist” and President Donald Trump has posted on Truth Social calling him a “radical left lunatic.”
The use of the Signal group chat was revealed Monday by The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who said he was inadvertently added to the chat as top national security officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, were discussing the operation.
Transparency nonprofit American Oversight filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday afternoon in Washington, D.C., alleging that the use of Signal violates the federal law that governs the preservation of government records, asking a federal judge to order the cabinet members to preserve the messages.
According to the lawsuit, emergency relief is needed “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 unauthorized use of Signal for sensitive national security decision-making.”
The lawsuit – which names Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the National Archives as defendants – asked a federal judge to declare the use of Signal unlawful and order the cabinet members to preserve the records immediately.
According to American Oversight, the use of Signal violated the Federal Records Act, and the chat reported by The Atlantic “strongly suggests” that the Trump administration has used Signal in other settings.
“Messages in the Signal chat about official government actions, including, but not limited to, national security deliberations, are federal records and must be preserved in accordance with federal statutes, and agency directives, rules, and regulations,” the lawsuit said.
President Trump and other top administration officials have downplayed the use of the Signal to discuss the attack on the Houthis, saying classified information was not shared in the chat.
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration is standing its ground in the ongoing dispute about whether it willfully violated a court order last week, arguing in a court filing late Tuesday that a federal judge’s directive to turn around two deportation flights was not a binding order.
In a 14-page filing, lawyers with the Department of Justice argued that U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s oral directive was “not enforceable as an injunction” when the judge ordered that the government turn around two deportation flights on their way to El Salvador after the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process.
The government failed to turn the flights around, and an official subsequently acknowledged that “many” of the detainees did not have criminal records in the United States.
“[A]ny any order that restrained the invocation of the Proclamation could not have thereby compelled the President to return foreign terrorists from outside the United States — and any governmental refusal to do so was thus not a violation of the Court’s orders,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign wrote in Tuesday’s filing.
At no point in the filing did the Trump administration argue it complied with the court’s oral directive to return the two flights of Venezuelan migrants, which was issued from the bench at approximately 6:45 p.m. ET last Saturday; instead, the DOJ lawyers attacked the authority of the bench ruling while insisting they complied with the court’s written order that was issued later that evening.
“It is well-settled that an oral directive is not enforceable as an injunction,” Ensign wrote. “There are powerful, common-sense reasons why only written injunctions are binding.”
Because Judge Boasberg did not mention the return of the flights in his written order — issued at approximately 7:25 p.m. ET on Saturday — Ensign argued that the Trump administration may have believed the judge changed his mind.
“When the written order did not include that command, the Government could reasonably have understood that as reflecting the Court’s more considered view in a quickly evolving situation,” the filing said.
According to DOJ lawyers, the flights carrying the alleged members of Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were outside of U.S. airspace when the judge issued his written order, meaning Judge Boasberg lacked the authority to turn the flights around.
“Here, any members of the putative class aboard the referenced flights had already left the United States when the minute order was entered, and thus had already been removed. No court has the power to compel the President to return them, and there is no sound basis to read the Court’s minute order as requiring that unprecedented step,” Ensign wrote.
DOJ lawyers also slammed Judge Boasberg’s authority to redirect the flights, arguing the directive is an “astonishingly ultra vires exercise of judicial power” that conflicts with “basic constitutional principles.”
“The President’s ultimate direction of the flights at issue here — especially once they had departed from U.S. airspace — implicated military matters, national security, and foreign affairs outside of our Nation’s borders. As such, it was beyond the courts’ authority to adjudicate,” the filing said.
On Monday, a federal appeals court heard arguments from the Trump administration seeking to overturn Boasberg’s block on the use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportations. The appeals court did not issue an immediate ruling.
Yemen site struck by a US aerial attack/ Mohammed Hamoud/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The Atlantic on Wednesday published a new article detailing purported information about recent American strikes in Yemen it says was accidentally shared with a journalist via Signal by senior members of President Donald Trump’s National Security Council.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
ABC News’ Hannah Demissie contributed to this report.
(ANN ARBOR, MI) — One of the alleged victims in a widespread hacking scandal involving a former University of Michigan football coach said she feels “betrayed” by the school and is fearful that her personal information was further leaked online.
The woman is one of two anonymous plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed a day after the Department of Justice announced Matthew Weiss had been indicted on two dozen federal charges alleging he hacked into thousands of athlete and alumni accounts and downloaded private data, including intimate photos, over eight years.
“It never would have crossed my mind that I could have been involved, and that’s, I think, why there’s so much outrage on our end,” the woman, a former University of Michigan female athlete, told “Good Morning America.”
The Jane Doe said she was at the University of Michigan for six years as a student and employee and does not know Weiss.
“I’ve been a fan of the university my entire life,” she said. “To know that I put so much trust and so much faith into that institution, and they have betrayed me in such a significant way — I mean, it’s terrifying.”
Citing the allegations in the indictment against Weiss, the lawsuit claimed that Weiss was able to gain unauthorized access to the student-athlete databases of more than 100 colleges and universities maintained by Keffer Development Services, LLC, a Pennsylvania-based company, and downloaded the personally identifiable information and medical data of over 150,000 athletes.
The former coach is then accused of unlawfully gaining access to the social media, email and/or cloud storage accounts of more than 3,300 people, including the two plaintiffs, and then downloading personal, intimate photos and videos. Weiss primarily targeted female college athletes, the indictment alleged.
“I don’t think there’s really any way to know exactly what information of mine is out there,” the Jane Doe said. “It’s kind of one of those things that you can’t really shut off.”
Weiss is among the defendants in the lawsuit. ABC News has reached out to his attorney for comment on the lawsuit and federal charges and has not gotten a response.
The University of Michigan and the Regents of the University of Michigan are also named as defendants in the lawsuit, which alleged that as a result of their “recklessness and negligence,” Weiss downloaded the women’s “personal, intimate digital photographs and videos.”
“I obviously am afraid of an individual that’s capable of doing something like this, but I’m possibly more afraid of a university that has the opportunity to prevent it from happening and doesn’t,” the Jane Doe said.
In response to the lawsuit, Kay Jarvis, the director of public affairs for the University of Michigan, said in a statement to ABC News, “We have not been served with the complaint and cannot comment on pending litigation.”
Keffer is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit, which claimed that the company’s alleged “misconduct, negligence, and recklessness also contributed to Weiss invading the privacy of Plaintiffs and their fellow student athletes.” ABC News has reached out to the company for comment and has not gotten a response.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the two plaintiffs and as a potential class action on behalf of other alleged victims. The number of potential class members is unclear but is estimated to exceed 1,000, the lawsuit stated.
Parker Stinar, a managing partner with the Chicago-based firm Stinar Gould Grieco & Hensley who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs, said he hopes to find out more about what happened to the alleged victims’ information and “to better understand how the university failed these individuals and to hold them accountable.”
“We’re talking about the University of Michigan, one of the largest, most powerful and respected academic institutions in the world, that allowed this to take place by one of their employees,” Stinar told “Good Morning America.”
Stinar said this “isn’t the first time that we have seen the University of Michigan fail their alumni and their athletes,” pointing to the case of the late Dr. Robert Anderson, who served as the school’s sports team physician for decades and was accused of molesting or sexually abusing more than 1,000 victims. In 2022, the university reached a $490 million settlement in connection with the allegations.
“We’re seeing it again, where the university has failed to protect those that give their blood, sweat and tears to the school,” Stinar said.
Weiss, 42, was arraigned Monday on 14 counts of unauthorized access to computers and 10 counts of aggravated identity theft. A not guilty plea was entered on his behalf, The Associated Press reported. His attorney, Douglas Mullkoff, declined to comment to the AP following the proceeding. ABC News also reached out to Mulkoff multiple times, but did not receive a response.
Weiss was released on a $10,000 unsecured bond, ESPN reported.
If convicted, Weiss could face up to five years in prison on each count of unauthorized access and two years on each count of aggravated identity theft, according to the attorney’s office.
(WASHINGTON) — Environmental lawyers would argue that part of the American dream is the right to live in a clean environment – a freedom from worry that the air you breathe, the food you eat and the water you drink are without pollutants and toxins that could make you sick.
But several of the environmental freedoms Americans experience today – clean air, clean water and clean rain among them – could soon be in jeopardy from the Environmental Protection Agency’s deregulation plans, several experts told ABC News.
On March 12, the EPA announced sweeping moves in its effort to walk back environmental protections and eliminate a host of climate change regulations, changes described by the agency as the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced earlier this month that the agency will undertake 31 actions, including rolling back emission regulations on coal, oil and gas production. The announcement also said the EPA will reevaluate government findings that determined that greenhouse gas emissions heat the planet and are a threat to public health. In addition, the EPA plans to eliminate its scientific research office and may have plans to fire more than 1,000 employees, The New York Times reported last week.
“Alongside President Trump, we are living up to our promises to unleash American energy, lower costs for Americans, revitalize the American auto industry, and work hand-in-hand with our state partners to advance our shared mission,” Zeldin said in the EPA announcement.
The EPA, with its mission to protect human health and the environment, is fundamentally a public health organization, Patrick Simms, vice president for healthy communities at Earthjustice, the nation’s largest public interest environmental law firm, told ABC News.
Revoking these regulations would hamper the EPA’s ability to keep Americans from getting sick from the exposure to environmental pollutants, experts said.
“Any policy changes that may occur under this Administration will continue to protect human health and the environment,” and EPA spokesperson said in response to an ABC News request for comment. ”They will be guided by science and the law, as well as input from the public. They will also be guided by many of the Executive Orders issued by the President and EPA Administrator Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback Initiative.”
Impacts some experts fear most from EPA deregulation
Environmental impacts such as toxic air, poisoned water and acid rain that killed forests and caused crop failures were all occurring prior to EPA regulations, the experts said.
Bedrock environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act were all established after the EPA was created in 1970 under Republican President Richard Nixon.
Some of the regulations Zeldin has proposed eliminating could negatively affect the safety of drinking water and the amount of pollutants that are released into the atmosphere, Simms said.
Additionally, the rollbacks having to do with air pollutants means those toxins will be deposited back into the soil, Murray McBride, a soil and crop scientist and retired Cornell University professor, told ABC News. Coal ash, for example, contains heavy metals, which are absorbed especially by crops like leafy greens, McBride said.
Loosening wastewater rules will pollute soil and negatively impact crops even more, McBride said.
Should the EPA cease monitoring environmental pollutants, it would be especially dangerous for people with underlying health conditions, such as asthma or heart illness, Paul Anastas, director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University and former assistant administrator for the EPA, told ABC News.
“People don’t know what they’re breathing when data is not being collected,” Anastas said. “You don’t know whether or not your water is contaminated.”
Deregulation would greatly reduce the country’s momentum in transitioning away from fossil fuels as well, Michael Gerrard, a professor of environmental law at Columbia Law School, told ABC News.
“This moves us even further behind, and it inevitably will mean that the extreme weather events we’ve experienced, the floods and the heat waves and the wildfires and so forth, will get worse,” he said.
U.S. environmental issues prior to the EPA
In the late 1960s, there was an “explosion” of public concern about environmental conditions in the country said A. James Barnes, a professor of law and environment and public affairs at Indiana University and former EPA general counsel and deputy administrator.
The year 1970 was monumental for progress in environmental protection, Barnes said. The first Earth Day occurred in April 1970, and when the EPA was established in December of that year, Barnes served as chief of staff to William Ruckelshaus, the first EPA administrator.
“In 1970, when most of the current environmental laws were initially adopted, we lived in a very different and much more hazardous and toxic country,” Simms said.
Smoke pollution and disposal of waste and sewage were at the top of the list of concerns, Barnes said. A significant portion of untreated municipal sewage was still being dumped into rivers and lakes. Hazardous waste was being dumped into landfills along with household garbage and was often incinerated, which in turn sent the toxic materials into the atmosphere. Some rivers were so polluted that they caught fire, as did Ohio’s Cuyahoga River in 1969, Barnes noted.
Lake Erie was considered to be “dying” because it was choking on an uncontrolled growth of algae due to the pollution, according to Barnes, who grew up in industrialized Michigan and recalled fishing in Lake Erie, where he caught carp that had “huge sores” on them.
“You wouldn’t want anything to do with possibly eating it,” Barnes said.
All major U.S. cities had unhealthy levels of carbon monoxide from motor vehicle emissions, before the EPA required that cars manufactured after 1975 be equipped with a catalytic converter to remove pollutants from automotive emissions, said Gerrard.
A chronic smog of air pollutants that hung over Los Angeles was viewed as a “national joke” at the time, Barnes said, while in places that had steel mills, like Pittsburgh and Birmingham, it was not unusual to see blackened skies from the heavy amounts of pollution in the air.
“Your eyes burned,” Barnes said. “Your lungs were aggravated by the quality of the air.”
Additionally, exposure to lead and mercury contaminants in the environment was causing brain damage in some people, according to Anastas.
Coal was the dominant source of electricity production, the burning of which reduced air quality due to high levels of sulfur dioxide and particulates emitted during production and use, Gerard said.
Atmospheric ozone pollution and acid rain would often damage crops, McBride said.
“In general, the air quality and water quality in 1970 were much, much worse than they are today,” Gerrard said.
History serves as a reminder of what could again happen if actions are not taken to protect health and the environment, experts warned.
“If we don’t understand our history, we’re doomed to repeat it,” Simms said.
ABC News’ Matthew Glasser, Kelly Livingston and MaryAlice Parks contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The number of applicants applying to law schools in the United States has increased dramatically in 2025 compared to last year and some experts believe an easier entrance exam, the soft economy and what they describe as a “Trump bump” are factors fueling the spike.
According to the Law School Admission Council, the number of applicants for law school has jumped more than 20% from 2024.
What’s behind the spike?
“I don’t think anyone actually knows definitively because I think there’s probably multiple factors at play,” Anna Ivey, a college and law school admissions consultant, told ABC News.
Ivey said the last time there was such a large increase in the number of law school applicants was during President Donald Trump’s first term in the White House.
“We called that the ‘Trump bump.’ There were a lot of people who thought it was a good time to flock to law school. Anecdotally, I can say there were certainly some portion of law school applicants who were motivated because of what they were perceiving happening in the administration,” Ivey said. “I suspect we’re having another ‘Trump bump.’ Now that he’s back in office, I would not be surprised if that’s happening at scale.”
Ivey said the mass layoffs at federal government agencies may have prompted many of the fired workers to go to law school.
“This administration is perhaps contributing more than the previous Trump administration because of all of those mass layoffs in the greater D.C. area — all those mass layoffs of very capable civil servants,” Ivey said.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that applicants to the nation’s nearly 200 law schools are up 20.5% compared with last year. The newspaper reported that Georgetown University Law Center received 14,000 applications to fill 650 spots, while the University of Michigan Law School received the most applications in its 166-year history.
Ann Levine, a law school admissions consultant who worked for 25 years as a law school admissions director, said she believes the boost in applicants is related more to what the climate is on college campuses than a “Trump bump.”
“What I’m seeing in my work with students is more related to the insecurities they feel on campus and also just the state of the world in terms of what their prospects are financially with jobs,” Levine told ABC News. “I think that getting a traditional job with benefits and a good salary has kind of fallen away. These are kids who have grown up with the gig economy, these are kids who were in high school and college during COVID, mostly high school. So their formative years have been very insecure.”
Both Levine and Ivey said changes to the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) over the past five years are also a factor in the increase in applications.
Ivey said the elimination of the LSAT logic games section helped increase scores. But Levine said the biggest changes in the LSAT were increasing the number of times a would-be legal scholar can take the test from three to five times in an admissions cycle.
“That has a ripple effect for everyone applying to law school, and that has a ripple effect for not just the top schools but for the whole food chain and for the whole ecosystem of law schools,” Ivey said.
Levine said another significant change in the LSAT is allowing people to take the test digitally instead of in person. She also noted that the LSAT allows far more accommodations for students with disabilities.
“You have a huge number of people getting more time to do the LSAT,” Levine said. “This used to be a very time-constrained test. And now you have more and more people getting double time, extended time, time and a half, more breaks. There are all kinds of things you can ask for that help them improve their scores.”
But the increase in applicants is making it harder for students to get accepted to law school, Ivey said.
“It’s not a great time to be an applicant, unfortunately,” she said.
(SEATTLE) — An 82-year-old man in Seattle woke up feeling very much alive until he and his wife opened a letter from his bank stating he was deceased.
Ned Johnson was mistakenly declared dead, which led to the cancellation of his Social Security benefits. It took him two months to prove the mistake, including numerous phone calls, letters to government officials and enduring a four-hour wait at his local Social Security office, he said.
And he told ABC News the problem is continuing to follow him.
“I’ve since learned that I’m on the Death Master File that apparently is going to chase me for the rest of my life,” Johnson told ABC News. “It means that when Social Security declared me as deceased, there’s a file that’s kept … that I’m listed on and, apparently, it doesn’t go away. So we’re struggling with a few issues now that are starting to crop up since we started this whole thing.”
The trouble began when Johnson’s wife, Pam Johnson, received a letter from Bank of America in February expressing condolences for her husband’s alleged death in November.
“First, I thought it was a scam because it was just a little letter, and they also attached a couple of documents for me to fill out to send back to Bank of America’s estate division,” she told ABC News. “So I verified that it was the estate division and the phone number was correct. And then the second letter we got right after that was showing that debit to our checking account.”
The situation finally began to be sorted out after Johnson visited his local Social Security Administration office. Ned Johnson said he thought his troubles were over, but he added, “This thing follows you follows you like a bad smell.”
He started receiving his Social Security checks once again, but he’s now facing another problem — the checks are coming but they’ve started to deduct some.
Pam Johnson said she and her husband are very lucky to be financially stable to make do with several missed checks. But others won’t be so lucky.
“I think the more important story is the people who do rely on it … the majority of people, a lot of them on Social Security, particularly at our age that really don’t have the wherewithal to navigate the system,” she said. “So for some people, it just would be impossible.”
The Johnsons’ ordeal comes as the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have targeted purported fraud in the Social Security system, including checks allegedly sent to deceased people.
Among changes Social Security recently announced intended to combat waste and fraud, recipients will soon have to verify their bank details in person or online, instead of over the phone.
“My advice would be, watch your bank account and be prepared to — if you get tagged with one of these issues — it’s going to take some time,” Ned Johnson said. “And you just have to be patient and persistent if you expect to get anywhere.”
ABC News reached out to the Social Security Administration for comment on the Johnsons’ situation, but the agency said privacy laws precluded it from discussing specific cases.
The agency pointed to a March 16 press release stating that 3 million deaths are reported to the agency every year and that less than one-third of 1% are erroneously reported.
(Mike Hutmacher/Wichita Eagle/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
(KANSAS) — One traffic violation on a Kansas highway led to the miraculous rescue of a 6-year-old girl who had been kidnapped.
Kansas Highway Patrol said the rescue happened after a highway trooper stopped an SUV for a traffic violation last month.
During the traffic stop, the trooper discovered that the front-seat passenger had a warrant for his arrest from another state for kidnapping a 6-year-old girl just over a month earlier, officials said in a post on Facebook.
Kansas Highway Patrol said the trooper had observed a girl in the vehicle about that age riding with the two adult male occupants, both of whom were in their 60s.
Officials said the driver of the vehicle had a criminal history that included homicide and numerous weapons violations.
“After the trooper and a deputy from a local sheriff’s office quickly secured both the driver and passenger, the trooper safely removed the little girl from the vehicle,” Kansas Highway Patrol wrote in the post.
Officials said initially the 6-year-old girl gave the trooper a false name and date of birth “after having been coached to do so, in an attempt to keep the adult out of jail.”
The young girl eventually told the trooper her real name when it was confirmed she was the kidnapping victim who had been with the suspect for over a month, officials said.
“Thankfully the girl was unharmed, and the men were taken into custody,” officials added.
The identities of those involved have not yet been released.
ABC News has reached out to the Kansas Highway Patrol for comment.
(WASHINGTON) — Attacks on Tesla dealerships, cars and equipment are “rudimentary” and require little planning, according to an FBI and Department of Homeland Security assessment, which says lone offenders are the ones carrying out the attacks.
“These criminal actions appear to have been conducted by lone offenders, and all known incidents occurred at night, making identification and arrest of the actors difficult,” the assessment says.
It comes as incendiary devices were found at a Tesla showroom in Austin, Texas, on Monday.
“While they may perceive these attacks as victimless property crimes, these tactics can cause accidental or intentional bodily harm,” the assessment dated March 21 and obtained by ABC News says. “Some individuals with political or social goals are likely to view the publicity surrounding these past incidents as validation that these tactics are successful in drawing public attention, and they may be galvanized to engage in similar violence.”
The bulletin also says that collaboration between state and local law enforcements can help track down the ones responsible.
“As of late March, the FBI and its law enforcement partners continue to investigate these incidents, and DHS and FBI are working with federal, state, and local law enforcement partners to disrupt and deter future incidents,” the assessment says. “In the next twelve months, incidents targeting Tesla EVs and dealerships potentially pose an increased risk of injuries to civilians and first responders.”
On Monday, the FBI announced a task force to investigate the attacks on Tesla dealerships, cars and equipment.
The FBI’s task force encompasses agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and FBI counterterrorism agents.
“The FBI has been investigating the increase in violent activity toward Tesla, and over the last few days, we have taken additional steps to crack down and coordinate our response,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X. “This is domestic terrorism. Those responsible will be pursued, caught, and brought to justice.”
President Donald Trump has called those carrying out the attacks “terrorists” and suggested those found guilty of participating in Tesla-related crimes could be sent to prison in El Salvador, referring to the administration’s controversial move to deport alleged gang members to the country.
(HONOLULU) — A doctor is suspected of trying to kill his wife by hitting her with a rock and attempting to push her off a hiking trail in Hawaii, according to police.
Gerhardt Konig, 46, and his wife were at Pali Lookout on Oahu on Monday morning when Konig tried to push her off the trail and struck her in the head with a rock, the Honolulu Police Department said.
She was hospitalized in critical condition, police said.
Honolulu police issued a bulletin asking the public to help find Konig, identifying him as an attempted murder suspect.
On Monday evening, Konig was spotted near Pali Highway and arrested after a brief foot chase, police said.
Konig previously worked in Pittsburgh, where he was an attending anesthesiologist at a women’s hospital and an assistant professor of anesthesiology and bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh Schools of Medicine and Engineering, according to his biography. Konig hasn’t worked for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in over two years, a spokesperson for the medical center said.
ABC News’ Tristan Maglunog contributed to this report.
