![\"Broadcast](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/TFN4UZNIFBPL7NZ3P4EAIC47PM.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Broadcast news workspaces are seen outside the White House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Alex Wroblewski<\/p>\n
Sign up for alerts on breaking news and exclusive reporting from NPR<\/a><\/p>\n A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to temporarily restore access to the three media organizations banned from covering White House events last week by President Trump.<\/p>\n In a ruling issued shortly after midnight<\/a>, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly for the District of Columbia granted a 14-day temporary restraining order to CNN, MS NOW and Politico, which had press credentials of their journalists covering the White House revoked on Saturday.<\/p>\n Yet the news outlets said some of their journalists were denied entry to the White House early Thursday morning. They have asked the court for an immediate hearing.<\/p>\n \u201cA Secret Service agent confiscated the hard pass of journalists from all three organizations,\u201d the request submitted to the court said. \u201cAnd when Plaintiff [CNN Reporter] Betsy Klein, whose hard pass was confiscated on Saturday, September 19, requested to have her hard pass returned, her request was denied and she was refused access to the White House complex.\u201d<\/p>\n CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a joint lawsuit against Trump to challenge that decision on Monday, on the grounds that their constitutional rights had been violated. They sought a temporary restraining order on the ban that would allow them to report from the White House as the proceedings in the case continue.<\/p>\n In his ruling, Kelly ordered White House representatives to \u201cimmediately return, reinstate, and restore\u201d their press credentials to reporters of the three news organizations.<\/p>\n Kelly, a Trump appointee, wrote that news outlets were \u201clikely to succeed in showing that their hard passes were revoked without constitutionally adequate due process,\u201d and on the grounds that \u201c\u2018individuals must receive notice and an opportunity to be heard before the Government deprives them\u2019 of a constitutionally protected interest.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump told reporters on Friday that his decision to ban the three media outlets from the White House had not been sparked by any specific reporting but the accumulation of what he called \u201ctwo years of unfair and negative coverage.\u201d<\/p>\n However, a court filing by the Department of Justice on Wednesday argued that the three news organizations were barred because their reporting jeopardized national security and spread falsehoods.<\/p>\n Judge appeared inclined to order the White House to restore access<\/p>\n On Wednesday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was nominated by Trump in 2017, held an emergency hearing after the news outlets filed a lawsuit seeking to undo the ban.<\/p>\n In his introductory remarks, Kelly said it appeared the White House had violated the news outlets\u2019 constitutional right of due process \u2014 which was set out in previous court decisions \u2014 when it abruptly blocked the access of journalists who held permanent credentials to work in the building.<\/p>\n During the emergency hearing on Wednesday, Theodore J. Boutrous, a lawyer representing the three news outlets, said the White House ban was in violation of CNN, MS NOW and Politico\u2019s First Amendment rights and called it a form of retaliation for their coverage of the president, adding that it was \u201cprobably the clearest case in history\u201d of viewpoint discrimination.<\/p>\n Justice Department lawyer Michael Velchik, on the other hand, argued that access to the White House was a \u201cprivilege,\u201d not a right. He also cited national security concerns as a reason for the continued ban. In its legal filings, the department had included White House letters to the three news organizations taking issue with stories on a variety of topics, including construction of a \u201ctop secret\u201d bunker under the White House ballroom, talks with Iran and whether there were \u201cvery bad\u201d vibes<\/a> at the recent Republican convention in Dallas.<\/p>\n Boutrous pushed back on the claim, asserting that the first mention of national security came only days after the ban was imposed.<\/p>\n “\u200aI guess the light bulb went off and they all decided \u2018Start talking about national security,\u2019” Boutrous said.<\/p>\n Court ruling questions Trump\u2019s \u201cactual motivation\u201d<\/p>\n In his Thursday ruling, Kelly said \u201cthe court is skeptical \u2014 at least on this record \u2014 that Defendants\u2019 interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of Plaintiffs\u2019 hard passes,\u201d in reference to White House press credentials.<\/p>\n In its court filing, in response to the lawsuit filed by the three media organizations, the Department of Justice included White House letters, dated Sept. 22, where it accuses the barred media outlets of \u201ctrafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.\u201d Judge Kelly argued that the defendants offered no evidence to explain how \u201cany of the reporting they identified in their letters to Plaintiffs damaged national security.\u201d Adding that the reporters who authored the stories that the DOJ lawyers identified in their letters to the three media \u201cdid not even hold hard passes.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelly also wrote that \u201cthe record is bereft of any relevant \u2018formally articulated standards\u2019 in place before any of the conduct\u201d for which the reporters had their credentials revoked. He dismissed the examples provided by White House in the letters to the three outlets as a standard \u201cso vague it hardly does the trick.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelly also ruled out the urgency of the case as to deviate from due process.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing in the record suggests the need for such urgency here,\u201d adding that some of the news stories identified in the DOJ notices to the media \u201cstretches back months or years.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe sorts of stories Defendants identify in the letters to Plaintiffs are routine,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Kelly\u2019s ruling came just hours after an emergency session by the federal court in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon in a case that media organizations and experts say will further test the First Amendment protections under the Trump administration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Broadcast news workspaces are seen outside the White House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Alex Wroblewski Sign up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":859162,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,450,451,22942,3,452,453],"class_list":["post-859161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-national-politics","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=859161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/859161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/859162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=859161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=859161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=859161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}