On Wednesday, Project Veritas filed a motion asking the court to block the Times from publishing more material from its internal documents, with a complicated argument linking the reporting of last week’s story to the newspaper’s legal maneuvers in the ongoing defamation lawsuit.

Project Veritas claimed that by “surreptitiously” obtaining the memos, the Times had “circumvented” the lawsuit’s official discovery process. In the filing, Project Veritas called the decision to publish the memos “a bare and vindictive attempt to harm and embarrass a litigation adversary by completely disregarding the sanctity of the attorney-client relationship.”

In his ruling Thursday, Wood ordered the Times to argue why it is justified in publishing the story at a hearing on Tuesday, but in the meantime to “immediately sequester, protect, and refrain from further disseminating or publishing any of Plaintiff Project Veritas’ privileged materials.”

Dean Baquet, the Times’s executive editor, criticized the ruling as “prior restraint” and a violation of bedrock First Amendment principles that have been enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court.