A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to temporarily lift a requirement that all journalists visiting the building be accompanied by an official escort while The New York Times sues to overturn the rule. The decision was another rebuke to the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict reporters who cover the military complex.
In a preliminary ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said the escort policy violated the First Amendment.
“This court has spoken at several points about the critical importance of protecting the freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, and that evergreen message bears repeating,” he wrote.
The decision is a preliminary victory for The Times. It bars the Defense Department from enforcing the escort rule against the newspaper’s Pentagon reporters. It is not clear when others in the Pentagon press corps will get the same relief.
The Times has challenged the efforts of Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to limit journalists’ access to his department’s buildings and staff.
In October, the department adopted a policy authorizing it to revoke the press passes of journalists it deemed “security risks” if they sought certain information from military employees who were not authorized to speak to the news media.
In a December suit, The Times challenged those rules as unconstitutional infringements of the First Amendment, and Judge Friedman sided with the news organization in a March ruling. One business day later, the Pentagon released a revised set of rules, which included the escort requirement. Before that change, journalists could move about some parts of the building without an escort. The Pentagon is appealing the March ruling.
In a preliminary ruling in April, an appellate court allowed the Pentagon to keep the escort rule while the case was being litigated, in part because Judge Friedman had not addressed the escort policy in the original court case.
Then, in May, The Times filed a second lawsuit seeking to overturn the escort requirement on the grounds that it was retaliatory, and that it ran afoul of press freedoms.
Tuesday’s decision means the court has now heard the arguments about the escort policy and found, preliminarily, that it independently violates the Constitution, Judge Friedman wrote.
The Pentagon has argued that its escort policy is critical to its obligation to protect national security, and that reporters who circulate without escorts are able to “maintain a persistent physical presence near sensitive spaces within the Pentagon,” according to the court declaration of one official. It said journalists had used their roaming privileges to corral sensitive information.
Sarah Welch, a Justice Department lawyer representing the Pentagon, said that the escort rule wasn’t “interfering” with news gathering activities and that “there’s no First Amendment right to the most convenient form of access.”
At a June hearing on the policy, a lawyer for The Times disputed the Pentagon’s claims and argued that the military’s public relations team benefited from interacting with reporters.
“The real value is being able to talk to people and establish relationships, and it’s a two-way street,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer at Gibson Dunn who represents The Times.
