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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.
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