The Trump administration must allow CNN, MS NOW, and Politico to access the White House while their lawsuit over the president’s press ban plays out, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
US District Judge Tim Kelly said that President Donald Trump’s press ban likely violated the First Amendment, expanding upon his previous legal rationale for ordering that the three outlets be allowed access to the White House.
He wrote that Trump’s own comments explaining the ban show a “likely causal link between Plaintiffs’ protected First Amendment speech and his revocation of their hard passes.”
Those comments helped the outlets prove that Trump had banned them for retaliatory reasons, in violation of the First Amendment, Kelly said.
“President Trump likely banned Plaintiffs from the White House because he believes that their reporting is generally inaccurate and biased against him,” the judge wrote.
Kelly’s latest order sets the stage for the Trump administration to appeal the case. His previous order that blocked the White House ban was set to expire Tuesday.
The judge’s new order rejected the Justice Department’s claims that national security concerns at least partially motivated Trump’s ban. He wrote that there was “no evidence in the record that President Trump made the decision to revoke Plaintiffs’ hard passes on national security grounds from the get-go, nor at any time has he directly stated that national security was the reason for his decision.”
Kelly, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in his first term, said that Trump’s comments led him to believe that the ban amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
Kelly, in an earlier phase of the case, had ordered the administration to reactivate the press badges used by the news organizations for due process reasons — meaning that the outlets were not given fair notice of the ground rules before their access was revoked.
His opinion Tuesday referenced letters the White House sent the outlets after their lawsuit was already filed, which ostensibly explained why Trump was banning them, while giving the outlets a deadline to respond. Kelly concluded those letters did not do enough to fix those issues — in part because they were sent after the ban was put into effect.
CNN has reached out to the White House and Justice Department for comment.
Ted Boutrous, the attorney for the media outlets, celebrated the ruling in a statement Tuesday, saying, “When the President issued his ‘ban on the free press,’ he blatantly and explicitly violated due process and the First Amendment. Since then, the President has repeatedly, candidly, and consistently admitted in public that he banned our clients from the White House to punish reporting he doesn’t like and to try to force journalists to cover him in ways he prefers.”
“The harm this ban did to our clients, the First Amendment, and the public as a whole is profound,” Boutrous added.
