Federal Judge Temporarily Allows Pentagon To Enforce Press Restrictions

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal court on April 13 temporarily allowed the Trump administration to enforce its media access restrictions at the Pentagon after blocking the policy last month.

Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the federal government’s request for a 14-day administrative stay of his March 20 order blocking the restrictions.

Friedman did not provide reasons for his decision, which stops his own prior ruling blocking the policy from going into effect for now.

The government had asked for the 14-day stay to allow the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to consider the Department of War’s appeal of the March 20 decision. In that ruling, Friedman issued a permanent injunction preventing the department from enforcing the challenged restrictions.

The Department of War tightened its rules for the media in September 2025 after officials said reporters were roaming the halls of the Pentagon, jeopardizing national security.

The new rules stated that soliciting non-public information from department personnel or encouraging employees to break the law “falls outside the scope of protected newsgathering activities.” They also stated that reporters would be denied press passes if officials determined they posed a safety or security risk.

The New York Times, which filed a lawsuit late last year to block the policy, previously claimed restricting journalists’ access to the Pentagon building and its employees was unconstitutional.

The media outlet said the policy ran afoul of the First Amendment by limiting “journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done—ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

In his March 20 ruling, Friedman wrote that the drafters of the First Amendment “believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”

“That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years,“ he said. “It must not be abandoned now.”

“We’ve been through, in my lifetime … the Vietnam War, where the public, I think it’s fair to say, was lied to about a lot of things,” the judge said. “We’ve been through 9/11. We’ve been through the Kuwait situation, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay.”

The judge also said at the time that the department could not show that it would be harmed by the cancellation of the policy, whose “true purpose and practical effect” was “to weed out disfavored journalists—those who were not, in the Department’s view, ‘on board and willing to serve,’—and replace them with news entities that are.”

The Department of War’s initial policy required media outlets to sign agreements vowing not to solicit unauthorized information from Pentagon officials at the risk of losing their press credentials.

After Friedman issued his ruling on March 20, the Pentagon instituted a new policy restoring credentials for some reporters while requiring that any journalists who enter the building be accompanied by an escort. It also, among other things, changed the prior policy’s language restricting the solicitation of unauthorized or non-public information. Instead, it prohibited the “encouraging, inducing, or requesting” disclosure of such information.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell reacted to Friedman’s new stay order.

Parnell said in a post on X that the department will seek an emergency stay of the initial injunction “to preserve the security of the Pentagon during the pendency of the appeal.”

“Journalists do not have unescorted access to the building but will continue to have press credentials and access to all press briefings, press conferences, and interviews,” he said.

New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander told The Epoch Times that the media organization will be opposing the department’s motion for a stay from the D.C. circuit court.

Jacob Burg contributed to this report.