Hegseths

NEW YORK — The New York Times filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Pentagon, attempting to overturn new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that have led to most mainstream media outlets being banished from the building.

The newspaper said the rules violate the Constitution’s freedom of speech and due process provisions, since they give Hegseth the power to determine on his own whether a reporter should be banned. Outlets such as the Times walked out of the Pentagon rather than agree to the rules as a condition for getting a press credential.

The Pentagon press room now includes mostly conservative outlets that agreed to the rules, and representatives from those organizations participated Tuesday in a briefing with Hegseth’s press secretary.

“The policy is an attempt to exert control over reporting the government dislikes,” said Charles Stadtlander, spokesman for the Times. The newspaper filed the case with the U.S. District Court in Washington.

The Pentagon had no immediate response to a request for comment on lawsuit.

Many still reporting on Pentagon from afar

Despite losing credentials, outlets denied access to the Pentagon have continued reporting on the military. They have led coverage this past week on stories that questioned Hegseth’s role in military strikes on boats with alleged drug smugglers, including one targeted with a second strike after survivors were spotted.

Nevertheless, the Times said denial of access to the Pentagon restricts its reporters’ ability to do their job. Because the new policy gives Hegseth the right to oust reporters working on stories he does not like, even if those stories do not involve classified information, it has a chilling effect on journalists, the newspaper argued in court papers. Lawyers are also concerned similar restrictions will be put in place at other federal agencies.

The Pentagon has argued that the policy imposes “common sense” rules that protect the military from release of information that could put them in danger. During her briefing Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said the legacy media outlets are not missed.

“The American people don’t trust these propagandists because they stopped telling the truth,” Wilson said. “So, we’re not going to beg these old gatekeepers to come back and we’re not rebuilding a broken model just to appease them.”

Outlets that reach millions barred

Several news outlets whose coverage reaches millions of people, including The Associated Press, Washington Post and CNN, asked the Pentagon for access to Wilson’s briefing. They were denied and told it was for credentialed press only.

The Times is citing Wilson’s “propagandists” comment as evidence that the Pentagon is discriminating against reporters for their points of view. That is the same argument that the AP is making to stop President Trump from denying access to its journalists to events in the Oval Office and Air Force One. The AP case is currently wending its way through the federal court system.

Times lawyers say they believe their viewpoint discrimination case is stronger because Times reporters no longer have credentials to enter the Pentagon. AP journalists are able to enter the White House, but not to some specific newsmaking events there.

The Times’ case is being filed on behalf of the newspaper and one of its reporters, Julian E. Barnes. The Defense Department, Hegseth and chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell are named as defendants.

In a statement, the Pentagon Press Association, a group that represents journalists who cover the agency, said it was encouraged by the Times’ “effort to step up and defend press freedom. The Defense Department’s attempt to limit how credentialed reporters gather the news and what information they may publish is antithetical to a free and independent press and prohibited by the First Amendment.”

While going it alone in its lawsuit in order to move quickly, the Times said it would welcome the support of other news organizations.

Bauder writes for the Associated Press.

The Pentagon’s inspector general has reportedly determined that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth improperly used the messaging app Signal to convey sensitive information, thereby putting a United States military operation at risk.

Media reports, released on Wednesday, offered a preview of the inspector general’s report, slated to be released in full on Thursday.

Anonymous sources familiar with the document told news agencies, including The Associated Press, that Hegseth’s use of a personal device to transmit sensitive information was deemed to run afoul of Pentagon policy.

The inspector general’s report focuses on a scandal that unfolded in late March, when the editor-in-chief at The Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote an article describing an extraordinary series of events.

Goldberg described how, on March 11, he received an invitation to join a Signal chat, apparently sent by then-national security adviser Mike Waltz.

Unsure whether the message was a hoax, Goldberg nevertheless accepted the invitation. Two days later, he said, he found himself in the middle of a conversation that appeared to feature some of the most senior officials in President Donald Trump’s administration.

Among the participants were Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Trump defends Signal chat

In the Signal chat, Hegseth reportedly divulged details in advance about a March 15 attack on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Those details included the precise timing when the F-18 planes would launch, when the drones would arrive, and when both parties would conduct their air strikes.

Goldberg’s reporting on the chat prompted outrage towards the Trump administration and Waltz and Hegseth in particular.

Critics decried the risks that the messages posed to US military operations overseas, with some worrying that, if the Signal chat had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have endangered service members’ lives.

This week’s inspector general report recommends greater training to ensure compliance with operational security standards.

But it declines to weigh whether the material Hegseth transmitted over Signal was, in fact, classified at the time.

Instead, the inspector general points out that, as secretary of defence, Hegseth has the right to determine the classification level of military intelligence and could have declassified the information if he decided to do so.

Sean Parnell, a spokesperson for Hegseth’s office, described that finding as a victory for the embattled defence secretary, who has long denied that “war plans” were shared over the messaging app.

“The Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth and proves what we knew all along – no classified information was shared,” Parnell wrote in a statement.

“This matter is resolved, and the case is closed.”

Parnell also took the media to task for highlighting the risks the information posed to US military members.

“There is zero evidence that supports this conclusion. None,” Parnell wrote in response to a New York Times post that raised the potential dangers.

On the contrary, Parnell argued, the “flawless execution & success of Operation Rough Rider” – the name of the Yemen bombing campaign – was evidence that no troops were put in harm’s way.

President Trump himself has previously called the fallout from the scandal a “witch-hunt” and questioned whether Signal itself was not “defective”.

Administration officials have repeatedly called for the scandal, dubbed Signalgate, to be “case closed”. Hegseth, meanwhile, has received no public reprimand from the administration for his participation in the chat.

A ‘breach in protocol’

But critics like Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer have called the conversation one of the “most stunning breaches of military intelligence” in recent years.

Some pointed out that foreign intelligence operatives could have intercepted the Signal messages. Others argued that Signal’s auto-delete function violated government transparency requirements that require documentation to be kept, albeit securely.

Democrats and some Republicans demanded an investigation into Hegseth’s actions. In a March 26 letter, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee at the time, the late Gerald Connolly, echoed that call.

“I request that you immediately open an investigation into this severe breach in protocol and national trust,” he wrote.

“The use of Signal to communicate this information jeopardized the lives of men and women of the military and embarrassingly advertised to our adversaries the careless attitude of our nation’s senior leaders.”

On April 3, Steven Stebbins, the acting inspector general for the Pentagon, responded to the outcry. He launched a probe and explained he was prompted to do so by the leadership of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which the Secretary of Defense and other DoD [Department of Defense] personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business,” Stebbins wrote in a short, one-page memo.

“Additionally, we will review compliance with classification and records retention requirements.”

Stebbins took up the post of acting inspector general in January, after Trump led a purge of government watchdogs.

On January 24, just days into his second term, Trump fired more than a dozen inspectors general – the nonpartisan officials charged with the oversight of various executive agencies.

That included Stebbins’s predecessor Robert Storch, who served as inspector general for the Department of Defense from 2022 to 2025.