WASHINGTON—In a major victory for the free press and the U.S. Constitution, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered President Donald Trump, at 1 a.m. Sept. 24., to immediately restore White House access and press credentials to Politico, CNN, and MSNOW, formerly MSNBC.
The White House granted access to all the banned outlets by late Thursday morning but only after initially ignoring the judge’s order. Kelly had demanded the administration explain its non-compliance by 12:30 p.m.
The order, which was supposed to last for two weeks pending a further hearing with detailed arguments, hit an immediate roadblock early Thursday morning when the Secret Service blocked a CNN crew at 6 a.m. Rather than comply, the White House continued to ban reporters for most of the morning, with MSNOW reporter Laura Lopez also denied entry.
The White House eventually backed down—only 40 minutes before the 12:30 court deadline. Officials made the last-minute claim that their delay in following Kelly’s order was purely a technology issue, saying that it took more time to restore valid status to the banned reporters’ passes.
Andrew Weisman, MSNOW legal correspondent, said the argument was a difficult one to make, however, as “all it takes is for them to walk downstairs and drop the credentials off at the door.”
Legal scholars said Kelly had full power of enforcement over his order, including jailing people who disobey. Many experts believe this possibility, and not the credential validity excuse, may have been what moved the Trump administration to reverse course.
Trump’s fight with the media started earlier this week, when the administration banned the three named outlets from covering White House affairs.
The broadcast networks—CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox—run a TV “pool” constantly covering the president on a rotating basis and feeding their livestream to other news organizations and the world. When Trump implemented his ban, the pool collectively decided not to cover him in protest.
When he first issued his edict, Trump claimed he has the right to keep anyone he wants out of “his” house. “I don’t have to invite anyone into my home, anyone I don’t want to invite in,” he declared at the time.
Kelly, a Trump appointee, said the president didn’t have a constitutional leg to stand on or evidence to prove his after-the-fact claim in court that the three news organizations and their combined 78 reporters involved represented a threat to national security.
The judge wrote that depriving news organizations of their press credentials and access to the White House, without giving them their constitutional right to challenge the decision, violated the U.S. Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendments.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press. The Fifth declares no person “shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Both are in the Bill of Rights.
“The court is skeptical” that Trump’s “interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for” banning the three news organizations, Kelly wrote.
“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests revocation of plaintiffs’ (the reporters’) hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” he added. Hard passes are permanent press credential badges, issued by the Secret Service after background checks.
“Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ plaintiffs from the White House. Instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs’ reporting,” the judge wrote. Trump didn’t even prove that, he said.
Before that, Trump had revealed his real reason: that Politico, CNN, and MSNOW don’t follow the administration line and report on him uncritically.
“This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process, and the rule of law,” Theodore Boutrous, the lawyer for the three outlets, said in a statement after the ruling. “We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action.”
Trump’s ban was another chapter in his crusade to crush opponents and the Bill of Rights with them. He sued other news organizations—and forced CBS into paying him millions of dollars—threatened ABC’s broadcast licenses, and insulted and demeaned individual woman reporters who factually challenged his assertions.
A year ago, Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House press room after AP refused to change its stylebook and rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, as he demanded. AP’s challenge to that ban is still stuck in court.
Past federal court rulings, going all the way up to the Supreme Court, stressed the First Amendment includes not just the right to freely report the news but to gather it, too. One such ruling was also by Kelly. He overturned Trump’s ban of Fox News reporter Jim Acosta during the president’s first term.
The NewsGuild-CWA President Jon Schleuss, whose Washington-Baltimore local represents the Politico reporters, hailed Kelly’s decision.
“The only solution” in battling Trump and for the Constitution “is to stand together, push newsroom management to defend our colleagues, defend our work, and hold other news organizations to account by calling on them to stand with us,” Schleuss said in a statement issued behalf of The NewsGuild-CWA, the union covering media workers.
“Over the weekend, our members at Politico released a statement saying that our member Cheyenne Haslett was barred from the White House ‘simply for doing her job,’” Schleuss said.
“Press access cannot be weaponized against journalists for their reporting,” Schleuss quoted them. “An attack on one outlet’s ability to cover the White House is an attack on a free press for all of us. We stand with our members and every journalist targeted for doing their job.”
Schleuss pointed out The NewsGuild is three for three in such cases during Trump’s second term, including a win a week ago in federal court overturning Trump’s Homeland Security Department’s unilateral cancellation of visas for international reporters working in the U.S.
Trump’s department gave no reasons for those cancellations, but the foreign reporters in general have covered protests against Israel’s war on Gaza.
Schleuss pointed out the political angle for Trump’s eviction of Politico, CNN, and MSNOW, quoting Fox’s Acosta. “Acosta told New York magazine Trump is trying to ‘distract the public from the serious political trouble he’s in’ and ‘soften up the press to what may be a challenge to the election results,’” Schleuss wrote.
Though the White House has now complied with Kelly’s order and readmitted the banned journalists, few believe this is the end of Trump’s attack on the free press.
Rep. Ayana Pressley, D-Mass., said it is clear that with Trump “we are not witnessing…fascism on the rise but rather fascism actually in power. Control of the press is always a feature of fascism in power.”
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