Judge Says Pentagon Can’t Impose New Press Restrictions

A federal judge said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his team have flouted his order striking down a set of Pentagon press access guidelines by trying to impose a new series of restrictions.

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled last month that Hegseth’s press policy, which went into effect last year, violated the First and Fifth amendments.

But The New York Times, which challenged the policy, quickly returned to court after Hegseth’s team revised that policy with even tighter access to the complex. Among other things, the Pentagon announced that closed the Correspondents’ Corridor, the journalist workspaces, with plans to move reporters to an annex outside the building. Moreover, all journalists would require an escort when they entered the building.

Friedman also found fault with a revised policy that prohibited journalists from efforts to “solicit government employees to violate the law by providing confidential government information.”

The judge wrote that he “has no choice but to conclude that the Department’s abrupt closure of the Correspondents’ Corridor and its ban on credentialed journalists traveling unescorted through the Pentagon are not security measures or efforts to make good on prior commitments but rather transparent attempts to negate the impact of this Court’s Order.”

Friedman also noted “what this case is really about: the attempt by the Secretary of Defense to dictate the information received by the American people, to control the message so that the public hears and sees only what the Secretary and the Trump Administration want them to hear and see. The Constitution demands better. The American public demands better, too.”

The judge added, “The curtailment of First Amendment rights is dangerous at any time, even more so in a time of war. Suppression of political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy — as the framers recognized when they drafted the First Amendment.”

More to come.