That's all in for the week, the briefing. Good evening, Jen.

Chris, I was just saying to Rob Malley, who's sitting here at the table with me, there are some days where you're just, you read, we're trying to be responsible. We want to explain what is happening and what people from this administration are saying what it means. And you're like, have I not had enough coffee? What the hell's happening? What are they talking about? It is one of those days. I have no idea. I have no idea. I don't think they have any idea. I think they want to, they want to kind of spin it as like it's intentionally chaotic to keep everyone guessing, but I think it's just chaotic. It may just be. It may not be three-dimensional chess. I think we've known that for a while. We'll have a great weekend.

We'll be talking more about this next week when I see you. All right. Okay, there's so much to talk

about this evening. I want to just start tonight with a hugely consequential defeat for Secretary

of Defense Pete Hegseth. We cover this a bunch on the show when it happened, but back in October,

Pete Hegseth put some what I would call Kremlin-esque press policies in place at the Pentagon.

I mean, he basically put a policy in place that said the Pentagon could revoke the credentials of any journalist who solicited information that the department did not explicitly authorize for release, even if that information

was unclassified. And listen, I dealt with reporters for 20 years. That is not how it works.

And you also don't need to have gone to journalism school to know that is literally the job of

journalists. I mean, Hexas policy was so insane that dozens of news organizations refused to sign a pledge agreeing to it, even Newsmax. Remember, they refused to sign it to.

The New York Times eventually sued the government over that policy, and late today the New York Times won and Pete Heggseth's Pentagon lost.

Late today, a judge ruled that Pete Hegeset's press restrictions are unconstitutional.

And in his ruling, Judge Paul Friedman did not hold back. Here's what he wrote. The court

recognizes that national security must be protected. The security of our troops must be protected

and war plans must be protected. But especially in light of the country's recent

incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that

the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government

is doing. So that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them,

protest if it wants to protest, and decide based on full,

complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election. And amen

to every word of that. I mean, the American people deserve to know what their government is doing,

no matter who's in power, especially during a time of war. And press freedom is especially

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