Judge Blocks Trump White House Ban on Three News Outlets

A federal judge issued an order late Tuesday blocking the White House from barring CNN, Politico and MS Now from its grounds. The preliminary injunction will remain in place while the outlets' lawsuit over the ban moves forward.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, who was appointed by President Trump, found the three outlets are likely to prove that revoking their reporters' hard passes violated the Fifth Amendment's due process protections and the First Amendment's speech and press guarantees.

“President Trump likely banned Plaintiffs from the White House because he believes that their reporting is generally inaccurate and biased against him,” Kelly wrote, according to the ruling. He said the president's own comments explaining the ban showed a likely link between the outlets' protected speech and the loss of their credentials.

The judge rejected the Justice Department's argument that national security concerns at least partly motivated the decision. He wrote that the record contained no evidence the president revoked the hard passes on national security grounds, and that Trump has never directly stated that as the reason.

Trump announced the ban on Sept. 18, saying the three outlets were “fake news” and should not keep reporting from the White House. The Justice Department has argued the president has discretion over who may access the White House, and that the outlets were given time to respond to written concerns about their coverage before the ban took effect.

Kelly first halted the ban with a temporary restraining order on Sept. 24, days after reporters found their credentials deactivated. He extended that order twice, and Tuesday's ruling replaces it with a preliminary injunction that lasts until he issues a final judgment, unless an appeals court lifts it.

Trump said last month that if Kelly ruled against the administration, the Justice Department would appeal. The ruling also arrives as the department defends the ban in court and separately pursues an antitrust inquiry into five television networks over their brief refusal to provide pooled White House coverage after the ban took effect.