Three news outlets have beefed up their legal complaint against the White House over access, saying it is continuing to defy a judge’s orders by refusing to let them return to covering President Donald Trump in the Oval Office and on Air Force One — thus violating their free speech rights by continuing to keep them out of the rotating press “pool.”
CNN, MS NOW and Politico said Wednesday that the president is retaliating against them for reports he does not like, which violates U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s previous orders for the administration to allow reporters for the outlets to fully return to the pool of journalists covering the president.
Even after those orders, the White House was continuing to block reporters for those outlets from covering Trump in “the very locations that the president most frequently engages with the press,” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., the outlets’ attorney, said in a statement.
The most recent filing asks the court to make those previous orders permanent.
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. The White House had not responded to the amended lawsuit as of Thursday morning.
“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 comes about two weeks after Kelly ruled that CNN, MS NOW and Politico are likely to succeed in the extraordinary case pitting the president against the news outlets that cover him.
In a victory for the journalists, Kelly expanded a previous, temporary ruling that the administration had violated the news outlets’ Fifth Amendment right to due process. On Oct. 13, Kelly also sided with a second argument by the outlets: that Trump’s ban breached their First Amendment right to free speech.
Kelly rejected Trump’s reasoning that the ban was driven by policy goals, such as protecting national security. He argued the ban was the result 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” — the government taking action against types of speech or coverage it does not like.
