New Pentagon Press Crew Is All In on Trump

When Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and the founder of the upstart digital news site LindellTV, recently heard about the chance to secure a Pentagon press credential, he immediately applied for four.

The outlet, which strongly supports the Trump administration and is known for promoting election conspiracy theories, already had accredited journalists stationed at the White House and in Congress. The Pentagon would be a perfect capstone, he thought.

“We’re going to make them proud,” he said about the administration in an interview.

It has been nearly three weeks since dozens of legacy outlets — including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the three major broadcast news networks — Fox News and Newsmax surrendered press passes that gave their journalists access to the Pentagon. They did so after declining to sign on to new rules that, according to many media lawyers, curbed their First Amendment rights to report on the military. Many of those outlets have continued aggressive coverage of the military from outside the Pentagon since then.

The Pentagon said it would not release a list of the outlets in the changing press corps, but The Times was able to identify a dozen of them. They range from widely popular right-wing podcasts to niche publications largely focused on issues like abortion, but are similar in their unwavering support for the Trump administration and the firm belief that ruffling government feathers is decidedly not part of the job description.

“We’re there for the big-ticket narrative stuff,” Raheem Kassam, editor in chief of the National Pulse, a part of the new Pentagon press detachment, wrote in a text message. He called his publication “basically an industry mag/site for MAGA world.”

Initially, the National Pulse’s eyes and ears in the Pentagon will be Will Upton, who worked in the Treasury Department during the first Trump administration and has been a frequent and vocal critic of traditional journalists, whom he has characterized as partisan actors.

Laura Loomer, the influential pro-Trump activist, said in a post on X late on Monday that she would be joining the Pentagon press corps, writing that she looks forward to “breaking more stories that impact our country and our national security.” News of her accreditation was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

David Schulz, director of Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, who serves as legal counsel for the Pentagon Press Association, said that the new rules amounted to an effort to limit what journalists could report and that the new outlets had pro-Trump leanings in common.

“These new regulations are really not about national security,” Mr. Schulz said. “They’re about controlling viewpoint and content.”

In a statement, Sean Parnell, the chief Defense Department spokesman, said the traditional news outlets had misrepresented the policy. “The so-called ‘journalists’ staged a self-deportation and filmed their theatrics,” he said. “We are proud to see the new wave of highly motivated journalists, who value truth, occupy the Correspondents Corridor.”

Mr. Parnell had previously said in a social media post that the newcomers amounted to more than 60 journalists, roughly equivalent to the number of traditional reporters who handed in their badges on Oct. 15. A handful of outlets that had been in the Pentagon press corps previously, including The Epoch Times and One America News Network, agreed to sign the policy and have remained there.

Mr. Parnell’s post prompted announcements from outlets that said they would be getting credentials, among them Human Events and the Post Millennial, sister sites that share a single owner and frequent contributions from Jack Posobiec, the well-known podcaster and Navy veteran who has a close relationship with numerous Trump administration officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“We repealed and replaced the press pool,” Mr. Posobiec said in a recent interview on Real America’s Voice, which itself said on X that it would be getting a Pentagon credential.

“There should be a place for reporting on what they are doing without always trying to expose the dark underbelly,” Ms. Emmons said. “And that’s part of why I said sure, I’ll sign your thing and come check it out.”

Major Washington outposts — Congress, the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — have long had their own press corps: packs of print reporters, television correspondents and their camera crews, who hover in the hallways and tag along with officials as they travel.

President Trump and his appointees have often criticized the journalists who follow them on a daily basis, but until now, the administration has never gone so far as to effectively remake an entire press corps.

Ms. Emmons said she had received an unsolicited invitation to apply for credentials after the legacy journalists refused to sign the new rules.

“We value what the press does every single day, but unfortunately we have seen a lot of the mainstream media continue to lie,” Kingsley Wilson, Defense Department spokeswoman, said in an interview that same day with Frontlines, a media arm of Turning Point USA. That outlet subsequently announced that it, too, would be joining the new Pentagon media crew.

Several of those joining the new press corps live nowhere near the nation’s capital, even though the department’s published policies say credentialed correspondents should be at the Pentagon, just outside Washington, “at least three times a month.”

Tim Pool, the beanie-wearing right-wing podcaster, said on X that he did “not intend to maintain a significant presence in the Pentagon” after disclosing that his outlet, Timcast Media, was also getting a credential. Last year, a federal investigation revealed that Mr. Pool was paid to produce videos for a company that was secretly funded by the Russian government. Mr. Pool, who was not charged, has claimed he was unaware of where the payments, which amounted to $100,000 per video, came from.

Under the new policy, journalists could get in trouble — and even lose access permanently — for soliciting government employees to “violate the law by providing confidential government information.” Securing confidential information is the bread and butter of accountability reporting and has produced some of the most important journalism of the past century.

There are few signs, however, that the reconstituted Pentagon press corps has aspirations to test the limits of those rules. Mr. Pool, on his podcast, said, “We are not an investigative news organization.” He added: “We do not have journalists meeting with sources in parking garages while they kick over a manila folder with secret documents. We don’t do any of that.”

Mr. Lindell, for his part, said he would “follow the rules to the T,” echoing the contention by Pentagon officials that leaks — even of nonclassified information — are a threat to national security.

“We would never do anything like the mainstream media does to jeopardize our country,” he added.