Pentagon experts warn 'enormous scandal' shows USA has 'already fallen off the cliff'

The Pentagon is requiring journalists to sign a pledge not to gather any information that has not been authorized for release — but a pair of reporters told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that's not going to happen.

The rebranded Department of War threatens to cut off access to the Pentagon for reporters who publish information, including unclassified materials — but MSNBC's Jonathan Lemire and his Atlantic colleague Frank Foer agreed that order was highly inappropriate.

"I mean, the answer is no," Lemire said. "Journalists aren't going to do this. This is not how this works. You know, there's obviously classified material, that can be different, that's vetted separately. Responsible news organizations do that in a responsible way. But the idea that a member of the Pentagon press corps or a reporter writ large can only write what the government tells them to, that's not how it works in the United States of America."

"Certainly a lot of press organizations condemned this immediately, a lot of reporters took to social media saying they're not going to abide by this, and it's hard to know how enforceable this is," Lemire added. "But we should note President Trump was asked at one of his gaggles this weekend about it. He actually sort of said, well, I'm not sure that's how it works, and yet then the official Trump campaign account backed it up and said actually, yes, this is why it works, this is what we have to do, and it's yet another way for this administration to try to control the narrative and try to make life difficult for their political foes."

The Atlantic's Foer expressed concern that the new rule hadn't drawn more attention than it did.

"This is an enormous scandal, and it would be normally the leading scandal on the front page of a newspaper, yet we're dealing with so many scandals simultaneously, so many abuses of power at the same time that this is something that seems, you know, like a page-six story relative to the rest of it," Foer said.

"This is about the the state blunting any sort of bastions of opposition that would slow down their ability to do essentially whatever they want, and the the state is essentially merging with these other, trying to merge with these other functions, and for a while it seemed like we were standing on the precipice, but in reality, we've already fallen off the cliff."