Pentagon gives fired Stars and Stripes reporters one week to fight, spends it defending their firing.

…(cont) Two days later, on August 29, the Pentagon told the court it would hold off — for one week. Judge Trevor McFadden noted it during the hearing on the temporary restraining order. All together now, clause one: a week's pause, granted while the request for a longer freeze was still pending.

Here is what the government did with that week. It did not sit on its hands. On September 2, Justice Department lawyers filed papers defending the plan to fire all three, pushing back specifically on the retaliation claim tied to the Abraham Lincoln reporting. The one-week reprieve and the DOJ's brief defending the firings it delayed sit four days apart in the same docket.

Then, on September 5, the pause ran out the way pauses do, and Judge McFadden declined to extend it. His ruling: the fired staffers were not likely to succeed on the First Amendment claims that had built the entire case. The firings proceed.

All together now, the last clause: a publisher, an editor-in-chief, and a reporter are out, over a case that started with coverage of a Navy ship and ended with a judge finding no likely First Amendment problem in how it was handled.

What the filings establish, in the plain sequence they establish it: a newsroom sued to keep its people employed; the government's own lawyers spent the delay it was given arguing the firings should stand; a court agreed the firings could stand. Nothing here required inference. It's in the docket, dated, in that order, and the order is the receipt.