A US judge in Washington ruled \u2060on Thursday that the Pentagon is \u2060hampering journalists in defiance of a court order that required it to restore access to credentialled reporters covering the seat of US military power.<\/p>\n
US District Judge Paul Friedman said the Defence Department must comply with his earlier order that sided with The New York Times newspaper and other news organisations \u200cchallenging restrictions imposed on them last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Department cannot simply reinstate an unlawful policy under the guise of taking \u2018new\u2019 action and expect the Court to look the other way,\u201d Friedman wrote in his ruling. The judge called the Pentagon\u2019s actions a \u201cblatant attempt to circumvent a lawful order of the Court\u201d.<\/p>\n
Representatives for The New York Times, Justice Department and White House did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment on the ruling.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon \u2060does not comment on pending litigation. Friedman at a March 30 hearing had expressed concerns that the Pentagon had issued revised \u200crestrictions for journalists earlier in the month that went even further than those he previously blocked.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon under Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said in October that journalists could be deemed \u200csecurity risks and have their press badges revoked if they solicited unauthorised military staff to disclose classified, \u2060and in some cases unclassified, \u2060information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A US judge in Washington ruled \u2060on Thursday that the Pentagon is \u2060hampering journalists in defiance of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574940,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[9257,23,232637,11320,29645,16675,3,252867,5472,127534,1572,38575,21286,21,19,22,20,25,53915,172407,24,2002,3123],"class_list":{"0":"post-574939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-abc-news","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-defence-department","11":"tag-fox-news","12":"tag-friedman","13":"tag-justice-department","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-paul-friedman","16":"tag-pentagon","17":"tag-pentagon-press-association","18":"tag-pete-hegseth","19":"tag-reuters","20":"tag-the-new-york-times","21":"tag-united-states","22":"tag-united-states-of-america","23":"tag-unitedstates","24":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-us-constitution","27":"tag-us-district-judge","28":"tag-usa","29":"tag-washington","30":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}