In the early hours of Thursday morning (Sept. 24), a federal judge ruled that President Donald Trump must restore press access to media outlets he attempted to ban from the White House last week. It comes after the networks sued the administration, citing their First Amendment rights.
The ruling was made by District Court Judge Timothy Kelly. Kelly’s decision granted a temporary 14-day stay on the ban in response to a lawsuit filed against Trump by media networks CNN, Politico, and MSNOW.
The networks were banned from gaining access to the White House last Friday (Sept. 18), with reporters having their credentials taken away by Trump administration staffers. The judge ordered the White House “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” those credentials to the reporters.
Trump banned the networks as punishment for what he deemed was negative coverage of his administration. Lawyers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) told the court that they sent letters to the aggrieved outlets detailing their reasons for the ban last Friday, but the networks testified that they didn’t receive those letters until Tuesday.
DOJ lawyers argued that the ban was in the interest of protecting national security. Judge Kelly wasn’t buying it, writing that “nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. 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.”
Kelly, a Trump appointee, has presided over another case involving Trump and the media. He ruled in favor of restoring former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials during Trump’s first term in 2018 after a hearing. The administration would drop the issue shortly afterward.
The court also heard from a group of 49 media organizations and outlets urging the end to the media ban. The group included the White House Correspondents’ Association, Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, the National Press Club, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News and the Dow Jones Co.
