Lawyers for three news organizations asked a federal judge on Thursday to extend his order restoring their White House access, which President Trump revoked last month over coverage he called “negative stories.”
U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee, temporarily blocked the ban last month and ordered the reporters’ credentials returned. His restraining order was set to expire on Thursday, CBS News reported, and CNN, MS NOW and Politico want a longer-lasting preliminary injunction in its place.
“Every day, critically important news is breaking at the White House, and the ban will substantially interfere with Plaintiffs’ ability to cover it,” their lawyers wrote in a filing. The ban, they said, inflicts an injury on all news organizations, “which now risk a similar fate if they engage in fact-based, independent reporting the President deems insufficiently favorable.”
The Justice Department says the ban is lawful under the First Amendment. “Access to the White House is a privilege — not a right,” Michael Velchik, senior counsel in the department’s Civil Division, wrote in a filing, and the government may control entry to “restricted presidential areas, such as the Oval Office, even for viewpoint-discriminatory reasons.” Publishing classified or sensitive national security information, he wrote, is “a significant violation of decorum.”
The outlets call that a pretext invented after the fact. The White House sent letters citing their articles as grounds for the ban only after the three organizations sued, and the administration has never explained how the articles damaged national security, they said. Judge Kelly himself called the articles “routine” at the case’s first hearing; some were written months earlier, and most were by reporters with no White House credentials, CNN reported. One Politico story, from June, grew out of a press call the White House itself organized, where reporters were told to quote a “senior administration official,” according to court papers.
Mr. Trump announced the ban on Truth Social in late September, citing “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” and warning that “other Fake News Media Outlets” could be next. The next morning, reporters from the three outlets who showed up for work were turned away, and Secret Service officers took their passes. The lawsuit followed on Sept. 21. The day after that came the White House letters, saying coverage of the new White House ballroom, the war with Iran and the Republican midterm convention threatened national security and violated standards of “professionalism and decorum.” The outlets had until Sept. 25 to respond; the Justice Department says they declined to do so.
“At base, the empty, malleable supposed standards cited by the White House do nothing but authorize Defendants to punish reporting they dislike in violation of the Due Process Clause and First Amendment,” Ted Boutrous, a lawyer for the outlets, wrote in a filing. He said the administration had lurched “from unarticulated standards of professionalism to nebulous and pretextual concerns about protecting national security,” while the president kept saying what the ban was really about.
The reporters got their passes back roughly 12 hours after Judge Kelly’s order, but the White House has refused to let CNN and Politico into the Oval Office or aboard Air Force One, places covered by the rotating press pool that has followed American presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt and stood in Dallas when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Asked by Time magazine last week whether he was ignoring the court order, Mr. Trump said no. His communications director, Steven Cheung, chimed in: “The judge basically ordered them to renew their access back to the White House, but that’s different than allowing the pool into the events in the Oval Office or on Air Force One.”
Mr. Trump, for his part, told Time the ban was about coverage, not security. “It’s just bad story after bad story,” he said. “I don’t think anybody should be forced to bear fake news, constantly bad stories, because I’ve done great things.”