Press freedom groups on Monday sued the Trump administration, alleging in federal court that attempting to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House violates the First Amendment rights of ordinary citizens to access information about the U.S. government.
The three outlets already won a preliminary injunction halting the government from enforcing the bans while litigation plays out. But the new lawsuit, brought by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute and Yale Law School’s Freedom & Information Access Clinic, alleges that the harms of the bans reach far beyond the three named outlets and deprive American citizens of their constitutional rights to access information.
“The White House cannot decide what information Americans receive by punishing critical reporting,” said Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “When the White House expels reporters because of their coverage and threatens others with expulsion, it isn’t just the press that suffers — the public loses access to independent reporting and gets something closer to government propaganda.”
The lawsuit was filed in federal district court in Manhattan on behalf of six named plaintiffs: Yale law professor Kenneth Roth; Yale history professor Beverly Gage; Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes; journalist Daniel Froomkin; University of Pennsylvania student Ethan Young, editor in chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper; and New York City high school teacher Peter Schmidt-Nowara.
“Media that pedal misinformation and defamation are completely capable of reporting their manufactured stories from directly outside,” a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Washington Post.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump on Sept. 18 first said that CNN, MS NOW and Politico would be banned for reporting what he called “fake news.” The three outlets sued and days later won a temporary restraining order from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee to the bench, that allowed them to reenter the White House grounds. Kelly converted that to a more strenuous and longer-lasting preliminary injunction on Oct. 14, writing that the media companies were likely to succeed in arguing that the bans violated their First Amendment press freedom rights and their Fifth Amendment due process rights.
Despite this intervention, CNN has been barred from traveling aboard Air Force One with Trump. Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a partner at the law firm Gibson Dunn who represents the three outlets, last week threatened to take additional legal action if CNN was not allowed back on Air Force One.
The White House has made additional moves to limit press access.
It last week prevented Andrew Feinberg, a reporter for the British outlet the Independent, from serving as the designated print pool representative following a fiery exchange with the president.
Jacqui Heinrich, a Fox News correspondent serving as the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, called the decision “retaliation.”
“The American public’s right to an independent press depends on reporters being able to do their jobs without fear that challenging the president will cut off their access,” she wrote in a statement.
The White House last week also threatened additional restrictions against Politico if it did not retract multiple articles about White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The news outlet pushed back on the threats, but did make a substantial correction to one of the articles following the White House complaint.
Trump also suggested in a lengthy Sunday post on Truth Social that he is considering moving the press corps out of the White House complex entirely.
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit said that they chose to sue in hopes of winning a broader prohibition against such White House bans — not just a ruling that would allow individual news outlets to regain their press credentials.
“As the Supreme Court has emphasized repeatedly, journalists are the public’s ‘eyes and ears’ in spaces they can’t access,” said David A. Schulz, director of Yale Law School’s Media Freedom & Information Access Clinic. “The president’s policy of expelling disfavored journalists harms the public and our democracy.”
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