Three Stars and Stripes staffers who received termination notices last week are suing Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon to block their dismissals, alleging retaliation for the outlet’s reporting on deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The independent military news outlet’s publisher, Max Lederer; editor-in-chief, Erik Slavin; and reporter, Lara Korte, filed the lawsuit in federal court on Thursday, Politico reported, alleging their terminations violated their First Amendment rights and Defense Department procedures.
Hegseth, the Defense Department, and Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell are named as defendants.
The complaint alleges that, prior to the outlet’s bombshell story on the USS Abraham Lincoln, the defendants were already displeased with Slavin’s and Korte’s speech as private citizens for speaking with CBS News about their editorial independence from Hegseth’s Pentagon.
“I’m working for Stars and Stripes... not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community,” Korte told the outlet in the July report.
Slavin also answered a question about whether there were any redlines he wouldn’t cross regarding Stripes’ independence. “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story; run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon,” he said. “That would be a redline.”
No disciplinary action immediately followed their remarks, as the Pentagon recognized they were personal opinions and were aligned with the department’s “own longstanding insistence” on the outlet’s independence, according to the complaint.
But in August, after the Stripes published its story about inadequate living conditions aboard the USS Lincoln, Hegseth pounced.
Lederer was ordered to hand “separation notices” to Slavin and Korte the day after the story was published, charging them with “insubordination” over their remarks to CBS News over a month prior.
The publisher refused and instead announced his resignation a few days later, citing concerns about discontinuing the paper’s print edition. The Pentagon then charged all three Stripes staffers with insubordination, citing their statements to the media.
The plaintiffs allege that Hegseth is seeking to fire them in retaliation for the Lincoln story and are asking for a temporary restraining order to block their dismissals. The complaint warns that they could be fired as early as Aug. 28.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Pentagon for comment.
The 46-year-old defense secretary has coordinated an unprecedented assault against the press throughout his tenure in the Trump administration, with his firing of the military outlet staffers as his most brazen act yet.
The Stripes’ story exposed the poor conditions faced by sailors aboard the carrier, which has been at sea for over nine months as it has been stationed near the Middle East amid President Donald Trump’s quagmire of a war with Iran.
The paper described sailors’ declining mental health in the wake of unsanitary conditions, food and water shortages, and exhaustion—all of which Hegseth vehemently downplayed.
“We make sure that every ship, every crew, every captain, has everything we can provide them at every single moment,” Hegseth told reporters in Panama earlier this month. “Some deployments last longer than others, and I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody.”
Parnell had announced at the top of the year that the Pentagon would be “bringing the Stars and Stripes into the 21st century” by steering its content “away from woke distractions that syphon [sic] morale.”
In his CBS Sunday Morning interview that led to his firing, Slavins said he did not know what “woke distractions” Parnell was referring to.
