Three journalists from Stars and Stripes filed a 45-page complaint in federal court in Washington on Thursday, asking a judge to stop their dismissals. The defendants are the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell and an aide, Andrew Brey.

The plaintiffs are the publisher, Max Lederer Jr., the editor-in-chief, Erik Slavin, and a reporter, Lara Korte. All three received separation notices last week. The stated cause was insubordination.

The strange thing about this newspaper

Stars and Stripes has published since the American Civil War. It is written for service members and their families, its staff includes both civilians and serving personnel, and roughly half of its annual budget of about $29 million comes from the taxpayer through the Defense Department.

It is also, by federal regulation dating from the early 1990s, editorially independent of the department that funds it. That arrangement is unusual anywhere in the world: a military ministry paying for a newsroom that is legally entitled to report critically on it.

The arrangement held for three decades largely because nobody tested it hard. The current case is a test.

What the complaint says happened

Two threads run through the filing.

The first is the reporting. Earlier this month the paper published an account of deteriorating conditions and mental health among sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during an extended deployment to the Middle East. Notably, that article was not written by any of the three plaintiffs. Their case is that pressure on the newsroom intensified after it appeared.

The second is what they said in public. Slavin and Korte gave interviews to CBS for a segment on the paper’s independence. The complaint states that the insubordination cited in their termination notices referred to those interviews — given, they argue, as private citizens defending press freedom — and that the notices arrived roughly five and a half weeks after the broadcast.

Lederer’s position is different again. According to the complaint, he was asked by leadership to fire the other two, declined, and announced he would retire at the end of September. The Pentagon terminated him before that date, citing remarks in his resignation letter.

The legal question

The claim rests on the First Amendment and on the statutory protections around the paper. Government employees do not have unlimited speech rights at work, and the government is allowed to discipline staff for genuine insubordination. The line the courts have drawn distinguishes speech made as part of official duties from speech made as a citizen on a matter of public concern — the latter carries protection, the former much less.

So the case will turn on characterisation. If a judge accepts that the interviews were the journalists speaking as citizens about press freedom, the firings look like retaliation. If the department can show the conduct was insubordinate in the ordinary employment sense, it has more room.

There is a second, related dispute already in the courts over the administration’s attempt to change the regulation that guarantees the paper’s independence. And a Pentagon directive issued on 21 August restated that the paper’s editorial operations should remain free from interference — a document the plaintiffs are likely to put in front of the judge.

Why it matters beyond one newsroom

The readers of Stars and Stripes are deployed service members and their families. It is one of the few outlets that reports on conditions inside the force for the people living in them, and it does so from inside the institution, with access no outside newspaper has.

Critics of the arrangement have long argued that a newsroom funded and staffed through the department it covers was never truly independent, and that this case simply exposes what was always structurally true. Whether that reading or the plaintiffs’ now governs is, for the moment, a question for one federal judge.

The Pentagon has not responded in detail to the allegations. We will report the department’s filing when it is made.

Sources

Complaint filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, 27 August 2026; CBS News; Newsweek; TheWrap; MS NOW.