WASHINGTON — U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly early Thursday issued an order that temporarily blocks President Donald Trump’s ban of three news organizations from the White House.
Kelly, in the eight-page order, said that the White House must “immediately return, reinstate, and restore the White House ‘hard pass’ press credentials held by employees of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO that were revoked” Friday and over the weekend.
His order will continue for 14 days while the case continues to be fought in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Trump is scheduled to welcome Chinese President Xi Jinping to the White House Thursday.
Although Trump has indicated he will appeal any court ruling on the matter, Kelly noted that temporary restraining orders are “generally unappealable.” He said he would schedule a hearing for motions for a preliminary injunction, which would last until the final outcome of the suit and could be appealed.
The case began Monday when the three news outlets sued the Trump administration for barring their reporters from entering the White House grounds.
The news organizations asked the district court to grant them either a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction that would require the White House to return the press passes, allowing the journalists to work from the complex once again.
Kelly, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, had heard arguments in the case on Wednesday and appeared skeptical at the time of Department of Justice arguments. In his ruling, he said it appeared likely that the news outlets would succeed with their claim that journalists were denied their due process rights before their passes were confiscated.
While the Department of Justice argued that earlier cases dealing with press access to the White House were wrongly decided in journalists’ favor, Kelly said that he was “bound by D.C. Circuit precedent, full stop,” referring to earlier rulings by the appeals court.
Kelly in his order also expressed doubt about Department of Justice arguments that the ban was in response to concerns about articles that dealt with national security or classified information, saying DOJ “offered little” to back up that contention.
Some news articles cited by the administration as endangering national security were written by reporters who didn’t even have White House passes, he noted.
Trump did not mention national security in announcing the ban and “instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting,” Kelly said.
“For another—and simply put—the record lacks factual support for Defendants’ contention that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes will in fact protect national security or that national security will be endangered if the Court orders their passes reinstated while this litigation proceeds,” Kelly said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from States Newsroom.
