Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional; The New York Times, March 20, 2026

Erik Wemple , The New York Times; Judge Rules Pentagon Restrictions on Press Are Unconstitutional

A federal judge tossed parts of the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets, saying they violated the First Amendment, in a lawsuit brought by The New York Times.

"A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets violate the First Amendment and issued an order tossing parts of the Defense Department’s policy, handing a victory to The New York Times, which filed suit in December over the restrictions.

Judge Paul Friedman, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also ordered the Pentagon to restore the press passes of seven journalists for The Times. They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security.

In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”

Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”

Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked About Due Process and Upholding Constitution; The New York Times, May 4, 2025

Jonathan Swan , The New York Times; Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked About Due Process and Upholding Constitution

"President Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he did not know whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, despite constitutional guarantees, and complained that adhering to that principle would result in an unmanageable slowdown of his mass deportation program.

The revealing exchange, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was prompted by the interviewer Kristen Welker asking Mr. Trump if he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that citizens and noncitizens in the United States were entitled to due process.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.”

Ms. Welker reminded the president that the Fifth Amendment says as much.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said again. “It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.” Left unmentioned was how anyone could be sure these people were undocumented immigrants, let alone criminals, without hearings."

Trump-appointed judge: Get CNN’s Jim Acosta back in the White House; The Washington Post, November 16, 2018

Erik Wemple, The Washington Post; Trump-appointed judge: Get CNN’s Jim Acosta back in the White House


"In a Friday morning court session, Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia lent his thinking to the matter, which resulted in the granting of CNN’s request for the TRO — meaning that Acosta’s press pass will be reinstated, though just “temporarily,” according to a statement from Sanders. In his discussion of the TRO request, Kelly considered the likelihood that CNN would prevail in its arguments that the hard-pass revocation violated due-process considerations. Likely, Kelly ruled. Wednesday’s oral arguments and the judge’s explanation centered on the 1977 case Sherrill v. Knight, in which a “court found that denial of White House credentials was a sufficiently grave infringement on the freedom of the press that it couldn’t just be done by fiat.” In his own summation, Kelly said that Sherrill stands for the proposition that the “Fifth Amendment’s due process clause protects a reporter’s First Amendment liberty interest in a White House press pass.”"