A federal judge in Washington has ordered the Trump administration to give back the White House credentials it took away from CNN, MS NOW and Politico, ruling that the three news organizations were likely to prove the government stripped them without the most basic procedural fairness.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly signed the temporary restraining order late Wednesday. It runs for 14 days, requires the government to "immediately return, reinstate, and restore" the hard passes, and leaves the longer fight — over a preliminary injunction — for the weeks ahead.
Six days without a pass
The White House revoked the credentials on September 18. The three outlets sued on September 21, arguing the move punished them for what they had published.
Kelly's order did not settle the First Amendment question. It rested on something narrower and, for the government, harder to answer: the outlets were given no notice and no chance to respond before losing access to the building they cover. The standard the administration said it was applying to objectionable reporting, the judge wrote, was "so vague it hardly does the trick."
He was blunter about the stated justification. "Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs' hard passes was motivated by national security concerns," Kelly wrote.
The Justice Department had argued that entry to the White House complex is "a privilege — not a right."
The story the ban was built on
The administration's court filings pointed to reporting based on anonymous sources, warning that "publication of sensitive security information … diverts White House resources and those of the national security team."
The Politico article at the center of that argument came out of a background briefing call in June, on which a senior administration official said a peace agreement with Iran was "80, 85 percent" done. The official, it was later reported, was Vice President JD Vance — who had been granted anonymity by the outlets on the call, and whose own words became the government's justification for punishing the outlets that carried them.
Turned away anyway
The order did not take effect smoothly. On Thursday morning, reporters from all three organizations were refused entry, and their lawyers went back to the court asking for an emergency hearing. CNN's Betsy Klein got into the complex around midday. Correspondents from CNN and MS NOW were kept out of the arrival ceremony for Chinese President Xi Jinping's state dinner.
The 14-day clock now runs while Kelly considers whether to convert the order into an injunction that would last through the case.
Reporting from ABC News, CBS News, The New Republic and Democracy Now!
