Donald Trump’s Department Of Justice made its latest effort to convince a judge—any judge, it sometimes seems—to sign off on its decision to try to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House on Friday night, arguing that the outlets in question failed to live up to Trump’s standards of “professionalism.” (A standard of sober industriousness that’s previously been applied to such a cavalcade of damaged administration chucklefucks that it’s hard to zero in on just one, although whatever “warrior mindset” bullshit Pete Hegseth is on on any given week generally floats to top of mind.) See, it’s not that CNN hurt Trump’s feelings with years of not saying nice things about him; it’s that they were unprofessional, issuing reports that may have even endangered national security and/or Trump’s beloved ballroom/bunker!
This is per The Hill, which also rustled up the legal brief in question, which attempts to double down on Trump’s lawyers’ arguments that press access to the White House is a “privilege—not a right.” Among other things, the filing makes a lot of hay out of last year’s Associated Press v. Budowich ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals, which found that spots like the Oval Office and Air Force One are “private spaces” that aren’t covered under First Amendment access. Trump’s lawyers are now pushing hard to apply that standard to the White House as a whole, including its press room, in pretty clear defiance of 1977’s Sherrill v. Knight. That was the case that established that, if the White House was going to open itself up to the press, it had to do so equally, and that press passes couldn’t be denied “arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” (The decision goes on to lay out, as its main example of a “compelling” reason, the physical security of the President, i.e., you don’t get a press pass if the Secret Service thinks you’re a violent whackjob.)
Trump’s lawyers straight up say they think Sherrill, which has set nearly 50 years of American press precedent, is “wrong.” But even if it wasn’t, they argue, CNN, MS NOW, and Politico have all given the administration “compelling reasons” to cut them, specifically “by trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.” Letters sent to each organization (days after Trump announced the White House bans on Truth Social, which is a whole other due process question) cited specific reporting on things like the construction of or funding for East Wing ballroom as the “unprofessional” behavior in question. After all, “bona fide journalists would identify sources instead of relying on anonymous sources, commit to factual accuracy, and provide the White House an opportunity to comment, rather than ‘perform their duties in a way that … interfere[s] with the White House’s daily operations.’”
At issue here, in the short-term, is a temporary restraining order granted to the news outlets by Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee who granted all three outlets a 14-day restraining order allowing them to continue to access the White House while he worked on his full decision on their request for a preliminary injunction. (Even as the White House has still worked to bump them from every other press event they can manage.) Kelly is expected to rule on a more long-term answer to the situation, and whether the preliminary injunction will extend through the legal case the outlets have brought against the administration, soon.
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