A federal judge on Thursday said that President Trump’s order barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House was likely unconstitutional and ordered the administration to restore access to the three news outlets.
Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington granted a 14-day restraining order and told the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the press credentials held by employees of the three outlets.
The news organizations were likely to succeed in their claim that the White House had violated their constitutional due process rights by revoking their press credentials without advance notice or an opportunity to respond, Judge Kelly wrote in the order issued in the early hours of Thursday.
He also rejected, for now, the administration’s argument that revoking the outlets’ press credentials was necessary to protect national security.
“This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law. We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action,” Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer representing the media companies, told CNN.
The ruling from Judge Kelly, a Trump appointee, is a temporary reprieve for the three outlets while the litigation proceeds. It pauses a chaotic series of events that began last Friday, when Mr. Trump declared in a Truth Social post that the outlets were banned from the White House because of their reporting.
On Saturday, journalists for each outlet were denied access to White House grounds, and on Monday, the outlets sued the administration, arguing that the ban violated their First Amendment rights.
Other media companies responded by scaling back their routine coverage of presidential events in solidarity with the three outlets.
It was not clear how quickly the press corps would resume its usual coverage.
In a Tuesday court filing, the White House described the ban as preliminary and said the news outlets had until Friday to challenge it. All three organizations had fallen short of White House conduct standards and were responsible for “reporting incidents” that “threatened national security and spread falsehoods,” lawyers for the White House wrote.
Judge Kelly’s rationale for ruling against the White House echoed his own reasoning in a similar case from November 2018, when Mr. Trump, in his first term, revoked the White House press credentials of the CNN journalist Jim Acosta. Mr. Acosta had not been given an opportunity to contest the decision, Judge Kelly said at the time.
Fights over journalistic access have become a staple of Mr. Trump’s presidency. In his first term, the White House revoked the credentials of another reporter in addition to Mr. Acosta. Both regained their credentials after going to court. At the start of his second term, Mr. Trump also excluded The Associated Press from the pool of journalists who cover the president in such spaces as the Oval Office and Air Force One. That case remains in litigation.
Mr. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has also imposed reporting and access restrictions on news organizations at the Pentagon. The Times successfully challenged some of those restrictions in court, and the Pentagon is appealing the rulings.
Qasim Nauman contributed reporting.
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