Sitting behind Leandro "Lee" Rizzuto Jr., Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas Kristi Noem attends the Organization of American States meeting where visiting Ecuador's President Daniel Noboa is to speak, Thursday, May 14, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
Federal employee unions accused DOJ lawyers of at minimum being "willfully blind" to the destruction of "discoverable" Signal chats involving former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, as a judge is set to consider whether to block the Trump administration from slashing Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) staffing.
Attorneys for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) have asked California-based Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, a Bill Clinton appointee, to halt a plan to cut FEMA staff by half by the end of the fiscal year, a plan that the government denies is a final agency action.
At the end of May, a motion for a preliminary injunction urged the judge not to take the Trump administration at its word, given "a sustained effort by Defendants to conceal and even destroy documents and information pertaining to DHS decision-making[.]"
"In 2025 and early 2026, Defendant Department of Homeland Security leadership created and began implementing a plan to cut the staff of Defendant Federal Emergency Management Authority in half by the end of the 2026 fiscal year—from roughly 23,000 to 11,500 employees, starting with the elimination of CORE employee positions," the filing said.
A footnote mentioned that CORE stands for "'Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees,' a type of federal employee that is statutorily authorized and funded by the Stafford Act and the Disaster Relief Fund, and which comprise over half of FEMA's full-time employees."
From there, the filing stated that discovery so far has "conclusively" shown that the plan the government denies — following a shift in March to Markwayne Mullin atop DHS — still hangs over the plaintiffs like a sword of Damocles.
On Wednesday, days ahead of a scheduled June 23 hearing, the plaintiffs made "serious" allegations that DOJ attorneys were to blame for discovery violations, either because they were "willfully blind to their clients' extensive use of disappearing Signal messages in disregard of their obligation to investigate" or because they "knowingly participated in the concealment" of a practice that "all but ensure[s] the automatic destruction of those communications before discovery."
Regardless, the plaintiffs said, the judge has ample reason to find the DOJ's clients "intentionally deprived Plaintiffs of discovery" through a "systematic violation of federal records requirements." After all, the DOJ acknowledged the "lost" messages "should have been preserved," the filing continued.
"Defendants do not dispute that their high-level officials regularly used disappearing Signal messages on their personal phones for agency business, in violation of their responsibility to preserve federal records. That is a serious admission that top DHS and FEMA officials blatantly disregarded federal law and agency policy," court documents added. "But they downplay the significance of the loss to this litigation and argue that the loss was at most grossly negligent, but not intentional."
The auto-deletion of months' worth of "relevant" and "discoverable" messages in chats involving "high-level officials" — including Noem, "Chief Advisor to the DHS Secretary Corey Lewandowski, and even agency counsel" — means that the Trump administration "should not be allowed to rely on self-serving testimony that is insulated against impeachment," the plaintiffs said, asking Illston to go beyond an order awarding fees as the "DOJ tries to wash their hands of these discovery issues."
"To remedy these prejudicial and intentional actions, the Court should exclude hindsight testimony from Defendants' witnesses that serves Defendants' narrative, and it should adopt a presumption that lost information would have been unfavorable to Defendants," the filing concluded.