Pushed Out. Reinstated. Pushed Out Again.

Last week, New York Times reporters were supposed to return to the Pentagon’s corridors. Instead, the entire press corps was banished to an annex, and the Times is back in court.

Ordered to let journalists back in, the Pentagon instead banished them to an annex on the far side of its parking lot. A Pentagon reporter called that “an elaborate troll.” Another told me it was “a bullshit move.” “How weird is that?” Paul Friedman, a United States District judge, remarked at a hearing on Monday. “Is it Catch-22? Is it Kafka?” Kevin Baron—the founding executive editor of Defense One, who has spent fifteen years covering the Pentagon—said the Defense Department is playing games: “Across the administration, they are purposely breaking rules and doing what they want, for as long as they can,” he told me. “This is the definition of asking for forgiveness later, except they’re not even asking for forgiveness. If they wanted to comply, they would have done exactly what the judge said the first time.” Making this move while the United States is at war, Baron said, is especially problematic. “During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Pentagon would have daily off-camera, on-record gaggles. Every morning, a dozen or more reporters would gather in the press secretary’s office, sit on the couches, chairs, even on the floor, and just shoot the shit. You had these moments because the Pentagon wanted to control the narrative; they wanted to do their jobs. And reporters sat in the audience and we did our jobs. All that’s gone now.”