Joe Scarborough Shreds Hegseth’s ‘Soviet’-Style Media ‘Pledge,’ Rants That Reporters ‘Keep the Pentagon Honest’

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough torched War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “Soviet”-style media “pledge” as he made the case that journalists have helped “keep the Pentagon honest” through successive decades of “constant lies.”

Major television networks and outlets have pushed back in a united front to reject a Trump administration order that will sharply curtail press freedom at the Pentagon.

The move follows a late Friday memo from Hegseth demanding reporters sign a new “In-Brief for Media Members” agreement or surrender their Pentagon access cards by late Tuesday.

The order forbids journalists from soliciting tips, photographing, or even sketching what they see inside the building.

As that deadline passed, Scarborough unloaded on the order on Wednesday, looking to the history of the Vietnam War as one example, he said, showed that media presence in the Pentagon was key to “protecting the men and women in uniform.”

After showing Tuesday night Fox News clip of Retired General and former Vice Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army Jack Keane criticizing Hegseth’s move, Scarborough let loose:

The important thing about that is the general is old enough to remember how the Pentagon lied repeatedly during the 1960s, across the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. It was constant lies every day and as a result of it 57,000 young men and some women died in Vietnam – predominantly men – died in the Vietnam war, that is a war that history now teaches us was built on lies. And what do reporters think, looking back? ‘We should have asked tougher questions. We should have pursued the truth more.’

This isn’t about Pete Hegseth or members of his family that don’t want the press around, this is about protecting the men and women in uniform from civilians that get put in positions and generals who may make bad boneheaded decisions – not only maliciously, but sometimes just because everybody’s human. They make mistakes.

But in the Pentagon, when you make mistakes, you have men and women sacrificing for this country who die and the idea that these people are not to be asked questions?

This is not the Soviet Union. This is the United States of America. Thank you very much.

Watch above via MSNBC.