Three fired Stars and Stripes journalists are suing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and two other top Pentagon officials. Amy Powell with Lawyers for Good Government joins CBS News with more on the lawsuit.
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Pentagon sued by fired military journalists as Trump threatens NBC's Kristen Welker.
As it ran on the front
Two stories landed the same week and the wire services filed them separately, like they don't belong on the same page. They belong on the same page.
Story one: the journalists who used to work for Stars and Stripes — a paper that has covered American troops since before most of us were born — are suing over what led to their firings, and the lawyer says the trail runs to Hegseth's office. Story two: the President of the United States is threatening Kristen Welker, a sitting network anchor, for doing the thing anchors are hired to do, which is ask questions he doesn't like the shape of.…
…(cont) You don't need me to connect these. A Democratic FCC commissioner already used the word for you: dangerous. That's not a guy at the end of a bar talking after his third beer. That's a federal commissioner, on the record, using the same word I'd use, which tells you something about how far outside normal this has drifted.
Here's the pattern, stated plainly: an outlet that covers the military loses its journalists under circumstances specific enough to draw a lawsuit. A network anchor gets threatened by name, on the record, for asking a question. Different outlets, different beats, same month, same direction of travel. Institutions that ask questions get smaller. That's not a coincidence you have to squint to see — it's a sequence, and sequences don't require your imagination, just your attention span.
What's actually at stake here isn't one anchor's job or one paper's newsroom. It's whether the people whose job is to ask the government what it's doing get to keep doing that job without checking over their shoulder first. That's not a partisan question. That's the question a country either answers correctly or doesn't, and right now the record shows which way this administration is leaning. Watch what happens to the next reporter who asks a hard question. That's the actual headline. This week's just the receipt.
“First they fire the reporters covering the military, then the President goes after the one asking him questions on live TV. That's not two stories, that's a pattern, and patterns are how you know it's on purpose.”
“Personnel decisions at Stars and Stripes are an internal editorial matter, completely unrelated to any comments the President may have made about Ms. Welker, which were about tone, not retaliation, I mean, they were forceful comments about tone, that's — that's still retaliation, isn't it. I'll move on.”
The receipts
Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), on Sunday described President Trump's threat to report NBC News's Kristen Welker as "dangerous." Trump signaled the "Meet the Press" host could face an…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.