The Trump administration must maintain White House access for reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico while a legal challenge plays out over President Trump’s attempt to ban the news outlets, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
Judge Timothy Kelly in Washington, D.C., granted the outlets’ request for a preliminary injunction to block the administration from enforcing the ban while their litigation is ongoing.
Kelly, a Trump appointee, said the media outlets were “likely to succeed on their claims that their hard passes were revoked without due process required under the Fifth Amendment” and that the White House unlawfully retaliated against them for exercising their First Amendment rights and discriminated against them based on their viewpoint.
The president’s own comments, he said, “suggest that he intended the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes to alter their reporting on him, bolstering the case that his action here is sufficient to deter a reporter of ordinary firmness from reporting in the same way she had before.”
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But Kelly added that his ruling shouldn’t be interpreted “to suggest that President Trump’s concerns about accuracy and fairness in the media’s reporting are unfounded, or that the government is powerless when its true aim is to protect national security when classified information is unlawfully disclosed.”
Last month, Kelly ordered the reporters’ press credentials be temporarily restored just days after they were revoked. He said the administration failed to give the outlets proper notice or opportunity to object to the ban. Kelly’s initial order, which he briefly extended, was set to expire Tuesday without additional court action.
Theodore Boutrous , who represented the media outlets, said the court was right to stop the White House from enforcing an unconstitutional ban on the free press for the foreseeable future.
“ The harm this ban did to our clients, the First Amendment, and the public as a whole is profound,” he said in a statement.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has long had a tense relationship with the press. Though his administration has made a series of moves to limit media access and upend the White House press corps’ traditional operations, the ban Trump announced Sept. 18 was seen as a drastic escalation of efforts to curtail coverage that the president perceives as critical of his administration.
The media outlets argued that they are being punished for coverage Trump dislikes, in an unconstitutional retaliation against newsgathering that is protected by the First Amendment.
Trump didn’t point to any specific story for triggering the ban, saying instead that his decision was based on a cumulation of negative stories over the last two years. After the outlets sued, the White House Press Office sent the organizations letters listing examples of articles it said “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods.”
The Trump administration argued that the president has a compelling government interest in excluding journalists from the White House grounds in order to enforce journalistic standards and safeguard national security information.
Kelly expressed skepticism about the government’s national security justifications when he blocked Trump’s ban temporarily last month. During another hearing last week, he questioned what to do with the Justice Department’s invocation of “those magic words”—national security—after the ban was already imposed and the president had publicly stated different reasons for it.
“Strikingly, there is just about no evidence in the record to explain or justify the ‘ban’ from a national security perspective,” he said in his ruling Tuesday night.
The government’s lawyer, Michael Velchik, had argued that the president also identified concerns about the outlets using anonymous sources and splicing quotations.
Boutrous urged Kelly to address the outlets’ arguments about violations of the First Amendment’s free-press protections.
Even though reporters regained their access to the White House, the administration has still found ways to keep reporters at bay. It removed CNN from a set schedule to accompany the president on flights and for more local events on three occasions.
CNN is part of the TV pool, which is a rotating group of major networks, including CNN, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News and NBC News, that shares coverage duties to save on the cost of production and travel.
When CNN was removed from the rotation for Trump’s trip to New York for the United Nations General Assembly last month, the TV pool briefly halted some coverage of the president. The Justice Department is now investigating whether major TV networks violated federal antitrust laws when they decided to suspend coverage.
Write to Lydia Wheeler at lydia.wheeler@wsj.com and Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com