Washington- A federal judge on Tuesday blocked President Trump’s attempt to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, indefinitely maintaining access to the offices of journalists from all three news outlets.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, appointed by Mr. Trump, granted the media’s request for a preliminary injunction, which will remain in effect until the case moves forward. In a 26-page ruling, Kelly found that revoking their reporters’ strict passes likely violated their Fifth and First Amendment rights.
“It is likely that President Trump’s revocation of plaintiffs’ strict authorizations is the kind of action that would deter a reasonable journalist or news organization from publishing stories he or she objects to,” Kelly wrote in his ruling. “The revocation of plaintiffs’ final passes is very important to how, if and to what extent they can do their jobs.”
The judge said Mr. Trump’s comments “suggest that he intended to revoke plaintiffs’ strict permissions to change their reporting about him, thereby strengthening the argument that his action here is sufficient to deter an ordinary staunch reporter from reporting in the same manner as she previously did.”
A White House official said the administration intends to appeal the decision.
“Fake news has no place in the President’s Oval Office,” the official said in a statement. “The lies they smear do a disservice to the American public and tear at the very fabric of our democracy. They are fully capable of reporting directly from the outside.”
Theodore Boutrous, a lawyer for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, said the court was right to block the White House from enforcing Mr. Trump’s ban.
“When the President issued his ‘press freedom ban,’ he blatantly and explicitly violated due process and the First Amendment,” Boutrous said in a statement. “Since then, the President has repeatedly, frankly and consistently admitted in public that he banned our clients from the White House to punish reporting he didn’t like and to try to force journalists to cover him in the way he preferred. The harm this ban has done to our clients, the First Amendment and the public at large is profound.”
The president announced last month his decision to bar journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds due to what he called constant FAKE NEWS “reporting.” Journalists from the three media outlets who showed up at the White House the day after the ban was announced were diverted and their press credentials were taken by the American secret services.
Media outlets filed their complaint on September 21 and argued that the president’s ban constituted retaliation against them for their media coverage, in violation of the First Amendment. CNN, MS NOW and Politico also argued that their journalists were denied their rights to due process under the Fifth Amendment because they were not informed that their reporting could lead to the revocation of their access to the White House or the opportunity to respond.
The day after the media filed their complaint, the White House Press Office sent them letters informing them of the president’s initial decision to revoke their reporters’ press credentials and setting a September 25 deadline for a response. The White House argued that journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico violated standards of professionalism and published articles raising national security concerns.
The White House has provided media outlets with lists of articles that it says “threaten national security and/or spread falsehoods.” But most of the articles were written by journalists who don’t have a strict White House pass. One of the articles Politico reported, published in June, was based on a press call organized by the White House. During the call, reporters were asked to attribute the quotes to a “senior administration official,” according to court records.
The media asked Kelly to grant them temporary relief and restore their reporters’ access to the White House, which the judge agreed to late last month.
His decision was then based on the media outlets’ due process argument. Kelly did not respond to their claims about the First Amendment.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico also asked Kelly to grant them longer-term relief, which would remain in place for the duration of the litigation.
At a hearing last week, Judge urged a Justice Department lawyer on the Trump administration’s justifications for the ban and why the government’s argument in court appeared to differ from Mr. Trump’s public justification.
The Justice Department argued that the president decided that media outlets should be denied access to the White House because they violated standards of professionalism and threatened national security. But Mr Trump has repeatedly attacked the media for “negative” coverage of his administration and for publishing “consistently bad stories”.
Mr. Trump “seems to have publicly and repeatedly stated” that he was acting “because of X and Y, and now the government is standing in court saying no, it was actually Z,” Kelly said.
The judge also said due process issues were “the biggest obstacle” the Justice Department had to overcome.
In his ruling, Kelly said the Trump administration failed to present evidence that Mr. Trump’s decision to revoke strict passes for journalists at CNN, MS NOW and Politico was initially based on national security reasons, and reiterated that reporting cited by the White House as raising concerns is “commonplace, for better or worse.”
“When he announced the ban in his September 18 message, he did not mention national security. When asked later that day for the “particular reason” for his action, he did not mention national security. And while it is true that days later he used the phrase “national security” in subsequent social media posts about the ban, that phrase appears to have been simply another way for him to describe the plaintiffs’ alleged inaccuracies and unfairness in their reporting on topics such as his achievements or his election successes,” he wrote.
Of the letters the White House sent to each of the media outlets informing them of the ban, Kelly wrote that they “appear to confuse concerns about otherwise protected speech (‘trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about… other issues’) with national security concerns.”
Mr. Trump has for years called out the media for coverage he doesn’t like, calling the media “fake news” and launching attacks on individual journalists. The president stopped the Associated Press to attend certain events at the White House due to his refusal to use the name “Gulf of America” after his decree change the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
AP sued and a federal appeals court allowed Mr. Trump to restrict his access to the Oval Office and Air Force One, places where only a subset of the White House press corps goes. But the appeals court has not yet ruled on the legal merits of the ban imposed by the White House against AP journalists.
Mr. Trump’s decision to keep reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico on the entire White House campus marked an escalation in his years-long feud with the press. When announcing the ban on the three media outlets, the president warned that he could revoke access to “other fake news outlets.”
Both CNN and CBS News are part of Skydance, the parent company formed from the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.
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