CNN, MS NOW, Politico Sue Trump Over White House Ban
CNN, MS NOW and Politico filed a joint federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump and senior administration officials on Monday, alleging that the White House’s decision to bar their journalists violates the First and Fifth Amendments. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks a temporary restraining order and the restoration of the outlets’ full access and hard-pass credentials, according to NPR.
The action marked a sharp escalation in a long-running conflict between the administration and major news organizations, and it drew an unusual public response: the five major television networks that make up the White House video pool announced they would halt pool coverage of the president in protest.
How the dispute unfolded
The ban was announced by Trump on Truth Social on Friday, September 18, and took effect Saturday morning. Secret Service officers confiscated the hard-pass credentials of reporters from the three outlets and denied them entry to the White House grounds. As the Deadline report on the announcement noted, Trump framed the move as targeting what he called “FAKE NEWS,” warned that “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” and repeated a claim that Politico had received an illegal $8 million government subscription under the Biden administration — an allegation Politico has called false and thoroughly debunked.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said his decision was not sparked by any single report but by what he described as the accumulation of years of negative coverage. “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative things,” he said. “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house.” He added that he thought it worthwhile to press the ban “whether it survives or doesn’t.”
The lawsuit
The complaint alleges that the ban amounts to First Amendment retaliation — punishing the outlets for protected newsgathering and speech — as well as viewpoint discrimination, and that it violates the Fifth Amendment’s due-process guarantee by stripping credentials without notice or process.
In the filing, the plaintiffs argued that the ban “could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” as CNBC reported. The suit contends that while presidents have long disagreed with press coverage, “the Constitution protects the liberty and property interests that news organizations and White House reporters have in their press credentials,” and that “no official can deprive Plaintiffs of those interests on a whim — with no notice, no process, and no warning — as the President did here.”
Named as defendants are Trump; Steven Cheung, assistant to the president for communications; White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles; and Sean Curran, director of the U.S. Secret Service. The named plaintiffs include the three outlets and three White House reporters — Akayla Gardner of MS NOW, Betsy Klein of CNN and Cheyenne Haslett of Politico.
The case has been assigned to Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who in 2018 ordered the White House to restore the press pass of then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.
“The President has been explicit that this ban is intended to punish reporting he doesn’t like and to intimidate journalists and news organizations covering him and his administration,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. of Gibson Dunn, the outlets’ lead attorney. “This ban on the free press harms the American people, who are entitled to rigorous, fact-based coverage of the President of the United States.”
In a joint statement, the three outlets said the government revoked their journalists’ credentials “because it objected to our reporting,” adding that, left unchallenged, the move “threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
Networks pull out of the TV pool
Within hours of the lawsuit being announced, the five major networks in the White House television pool — CNN, Fox News, ABC, NBC and CBS — said they would stop providing pool coverage of the president for as long as the restrictions stand. Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, then serving as pool chair, issued the memo announcing the decision, which Deadline also reported.
“This follows the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties. There will be no replacement pool put in place,” the memo said. Other pool coverage, including of Congress and other events, was set to continue, with print, photo and radio pool coverage unaffected.
In a statement, the five networks said, “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
Why the case matters
The dispute turns on a well-established legal principle: presidents are not obligated to admit any particular journalist to the White House, but once access is granted, it cannot be revoked arbitrarily or because of an outlet’s viewpoint. Jacqui Heinrich, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and a Fox News correspondent, made that point in condemning the ban.
“That protection does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization’s coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask,” she said. “It is about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the activities, policies and decisions of whoever occupies the nation’s highest office.”
The administration has lost several similar legal fights. In April 2025, Judge Trevor McFadden — also a Trump appointee — ruled that the White House’s partial ban on the Associated Press violated the First Amendment, holding that “if the Government opens its doors to some journalists … it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints.” A D.C. Circuit panel stayed that ruling pending appeal, and the case remains undecided. A federal judge also found unconstitutional a Trump executive order seeking to withhold federal funds from NPR and PBS.
As El Pais noted, the move is unprecedented: while individual journalists have lost passes — including Helen Thomas under the Obama administration and Acosta during Trump’s first term — no U.S. president had previously barred an entire news organization from White House access. Roughly 900 journalists from more than 250 outlets hold permanent White House credentials, and a rotating pool represents the full press corps at smaller events.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, welcomed the lawsuit, calling the ban “a flagrant violation of the First Amendment” and “an attack both on press freedom and the public’s right to independent information about the government.”
The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump rejected the framing of the ban as an attack on the press. “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish,” he wrote. “It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS.”
What to watch
The immediate focus is whether Judge Kelly grants the requested temporary restraining order restoring the outlets’ credentials and returning CNN to the pool rotation. The pool boycott is unfolding during a busy diplomatic week, with Trump scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly and to host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. The broader question — how far a president may go in excluding news organizations whose coverage he dislikes — now sits before a court that has ruled against this administration on press access before.