A federal judge sided with three major news outlets early Thursday, ordering the Trump administration to restore CNN, MS NOW and Politico‘s White House credentials after finding they’d been pulled without “constitutionally adequate due process.”
The 14-day temporary restraining order keeps their access in place while the underlying lawsuit proceeds, and the judge, Timothy Kelly, wrote the outlets are likely to succeed on the merits.
“Individuals must receive notice and an opportunity to be heard before the Government deprives them” of a constitutionally protected interest, Kelly wrote, noting the White House waited until Wednesday to give the reporters any chance to challenge the decision, days after their badges had already been pulled.
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Trump had announced the ban in a Truth Social post the previous Friday, writing he was removing the outlets over their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!”
The ban also drew an unusual show of solidarity from the rest of the press corps. ABC, CBS, NBC and even Fox News all declined to provide a replacement television pooler once CNN was blocked from its scheduled White House duties, leaving some presidential events without the standard shared coverage networks normally split among themselves.
The five networks said jointly that the public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government.
Read: “Official State-Run Media”—Critics Pile On As White House Launches Its Own Channel
In 2018, the same judge — a Trump nominee from his first term — ordered the White House to restore CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s press pass after the White House pulled it following a contentious press conference exchange, ruling on the same due-process theory and citing the same 1977 DC Circuit precedent he leaned on this week.
Trump seemed to expect the rematch to go the same way. In a late-night Truth Social tirade Tuesday — the same post where he predicted the “totally disloyal” Kelly would rule against him and vowed he’d “go for appeal” as usual — he also tore into CNN’s Kaitlan Collins by name, calling her a “sleazebag” with a “Trump addiction.” That came hours after he’d confronted her in person at the UN, telling her “you should not be here covering me” when she tried to ask about Republican unease over the Iran war; Collins shot back that the UN, not the White House, had credentialed her.
Trump has called Collins “nasty” and “stupid,” mocked her at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and snapped “quiet, quiet, piggy” at a different reporter just last November for pressing him on the Epstein files.
Justice Department lawyers had argued at the hearing that the outlets endangered national security, but Kelly pointed out that wasn’t the reasoning Trump himself gave. “That is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs,” Kelly wrote — Trump had instead pointed to what he called years of dishonest, negative coverage. Speaking to reporters afterward, Trump was blunt about his own motives: “I don’t want them in my office. I don’t want them here.”
