Judge Orders the White House to Reinstate Access to Banned Outlets

The Trump administration must temporarily restore access to MS NOW, CNN and Politico, a federal judge ruled early Thursday, nearly a week after President Donald Trump banned the outlets from the White House.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted a 14-day restraining order and told the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” press credentials to journalists at the three outlets.

Trump said Friday that he was banning the outlets from the White House for reporting what he called “fake news.” The news organizations’ credentials were revoked on Saturday, and on Monday, the outlets filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, saying it had violated the journalists’ First Amendment rights.

The Justice Department argued in court Wednesday that the outlets’ reporting threatened national security, a new justification only used after the reporters’ access was revoked.

In his order, Kelly said that while security concerns are a “weighty interest,” the White House had failed to back up its assertions enough to justify the revocation — especially since mentions of “national security” came well after Trump’s initial post.

“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” Kelly wrote, adding that Trump’s primary focus was the “negativity” of the outlets’ reporting.

The government provided the court with a list of 13 stories that it said showed the outlets had jeopardized national security, but Kelly dismissed the declarations. He wrote that DOJ had filed nothing, classified or unclassified, that proved the stories cited risked national security. Kelly also downplayed statements filed by Defense Department officials in support of the ban, saying they have “no direct knowledge” of how White House reporting works.

Additional filings from the outlets show many of the reporters who wrote the stories in question “did not even hold hard passes,” Kelly, a Trump appointee, wrote. “In the remaining cases, Defendants afford no reason to believe that the reporter’s possession of the hard pass was integral to the stories identified.”

Dozens of media outlets from across the country publicly supported CNN, MS NOW and Politico through an amicus brief filed Wednesday, which argued Trump’s ban goes against the public interest and seeks to squash reporting the president may view as unfavorable.

“It is designed to have a chilling effect, with the hope that it discourages other outlets from publishing stories that they fear might provoke similar sanctions,” the brief said.