WASHINGTON — “I tap my badge, it beeps a couple of times and turns red, blue, and green, and it didn’t accept my PIN number.” That was how CNN’s Betsy Klein described arriving for work at the White House on Saturday, a day after President Donald Trump announced he was banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the building. A Secret Service agent at the post told her the pass had been deactivated, she said. He kept the badge.
Klein had done the usual routine: bag through the scanner, badge on the reader, four-digit PIN. The only difference, she said, was a group of cameras waiting outside the gate. She asked for a reason and was told he had no further information and that she should go to the White House Press Office.
MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner went live with a similar account. An officer asked her to hand over her badge, said it was disabled, and told her the decision was “above him.” Her photographer was also refused entry, though an MS NOW producer got in on a badge that still worked. Politico said its White House reporter, Cheyenne Haslett, was turned away too and had her badge confiscated.
The ban, in the president’s words
Trump announced the ban on Friday in a post on Truth Social. He called the outlets fake news, said other media organizations could follow, and took a swipe at Politico over a federal subscription deal from the Biden years. Vice President JD Vance later told reporters the journalism of the three outlets was “effectively far-left propaganda” and said they could still report, just not from offices in the White House. The administration also posted on X that “White House access is a privilege, not a right.”
Trump separately wrote that he was not mounting an assault on the free press, which he said he cherished, but on fake news.
Lawsuit and pool fallout
On Monday the three outlets sued. Their joint statement said the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes. In the complaint, filed with a request for a temporary restraining order, they called the ban “a more direct assault on the First Amendment” than anything they could imagine and argued the credentials were pulled without notice or process. The case went to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee from his first term. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University said it would file a brief in support.
The ban hit the television pool at once. CNN had been due to serve as pool network for Trump’s trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly. The White House schedule named no replacement, and Fox’s Bryan Boughton, chair of the pool, told members that the TV pool would not cover presidential events until further notice. The Associated Press, The Washington Post and The New York Times held back their photographs of presidential events on Monday. With no cameras present, Trump unveiled a new White House helicopter landing pad unrecorded.
Jacqui Heinrich, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, said the revocation violated the First Amendment. “A standard used to exclude one news outlet because of its coverage could be applied to any outlet in the future,” she said.
The fight has a precedent. Last year Trump barred Associated Press reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One after the agency declined to adopt the name Gulf of America, and that suit is still running.
Sources
- 'First Amendment Rights': CNN, MS NOW, POLITICO Sue Trump Government Over White House Press Ban | Republic World
- CNN, MS NOW, Politico sue over denied White House access, citing First Amendment
