The Daily Fuckup

A federal judge said on April 9 that the Pentagon’s revised interim press policy still did not comply with his March 20 order blocking key access restrictions on reporters.

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman had already ruled that parts of the Pentagon’s policy on press access could not stand and ordered the department to restore access and explain how it would comply. In the new ruling, he said the Defense Department’s updated interim rules did not fix the problem.

The dispute is over whether the Pentagon actually followed the court’s instructions after the earlier ruling. The department issued a revised policy after the March 20 order, but Friedman concluded that the rewrite still left reporters subject to restrictions that ran counter to his decision. The judge’s April 9 finding means the Pentagon cannot treat the new policy as a clean resolution of the case.

The fight goes to how much access reporters get inside one of the government’s most closely watched institutions. It also puts the court in the position of deciding whether the Pentagon’s response was a real change or just a narrower version of the same limits. The department has said it would appeal the earlier ruling.