The Department of Defense has been ordered to turn over previously withheld documents on the military's ban on transgender troops.

U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, issued the order on Friday as part of an ongoing legal challenge to the policy, the Washington Blade reported.

The Trump administration has asserted deliberative process privilege in withholding the documents. Pechman disagreed and ordered the administration to produce the documents by October 5.

The case, Karnowski v. Trump, is one of four challenging Trump's decision in 2017 to prohibit transgender people from serving in the military “in any capacity.”

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the policy to go into effect as the cases proceed.

At issue is whether Trump's comments on the policy affected an ongoing review of open transgender service being conducted by former Defense Secretary James Mattis.

“[O]ne of the central questions in this litigation is whether the Mattis Policy was 'dictated' by the president and therefore 'preordained,' or whether it is the product of independent military judgment, separate and apart from the president's tweet,” Pechman wrote. “The documents at issue in this motion are directed to this central question – whether the Mattis Policy was nothing more than the implementation of the 2017 memorandum or an independent review.”

Pechman noted that the Defense Department was implementing the policy of open service as directed by former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter under President Barack Obama.

“This came to a screeching halt with the president's tweet,” she wrote.

The documents in question “do not deal with a policy process,” Pechman wrote. “The DPP is designed to protect the deliberative process, it is not to be a method for avoiding production of 'inconvenient' or embarrassing documents.”