White House still blocks outlets from Oval Office, Air Force One
CNN, MSNOW and Politico said Wednesday that the White House is continuing to defy court orders by keeping their reporters out of the Oval Office and off Air Force One, and they asked the court to make its earlier rulings permanent. In an amended filing, the outlets said President Donald Trump is retaliating against them for reports he does not like, which they argue violates U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s previous orders to allow their journalists to fully return to the pool of reporters covering the president.
Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., the outlets’ attorney, said in a statement that the White House was continuing to block the outlets’ reporters from covering Trump in “the very locations that the president most frequently engages with the press.”
At issue is whether the president, or anyone, can punish news outlets for the content of their reports. The news organizations say that doing so is “viewpoint discrimination” forbidden by the First Amendment’s free-speech protections. Trump insists that he doesn’t have to let news outlets whose reports he dislikes onto White House grounds, on Air Force One or other areas. As of Thursday morning, the White House had not responded to the amended lawsuit.
“Every news organization now faces the risk of similar punishment for coverage the President deems insufficiently favorable,” the outlets wrote in their filing, “and the public is deprived of current and complete information about its government.”
The filing came about two weeks after Kelly ruled that CNN, MSNOW and Politico are likely to succeed in the extraordinary case pitting the president against the news outlets that cover him. Kelly had expanded a previous, temporary ruling that the administration violated the outlets’ Fifth Amendment right to due process. On Oct. 13, he sided with a second argument by the outlets: that the ban breached their First Amendment right to free speech.
Kelly rejected Trump’s argument that the ban was driven by policy goals such as protecting national security, concluding instead that it grew out of Trump’s stated belief that the outlets’ reporting was inaccurate and biased. “Simply put,” Kelly wrote in the opinion, “That is unlawful viewpoint discrimination.”