Key moments from hearing on White House ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico

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A federal judge is weighing whether to restore the ability of CNN, MS NOW and Politico to access the White House, after a 45-minute hearing Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the ban against them announced by President Donald Trump late last week.

At the outset, Judge Timothy Kelly noted that the White House did not appear to give reporters appropriate due process, as laid out by relevant court precedent, before revoking their access. But he also asked questions to test the limits of the outlets’ arguments against the national security rationale the administration is embracing to defend the ban.

The hearing covered the key arguments from the news organizations, with a lawyer for the media companies telling the judge that Trump was attacking the “very essence of the First Amendment,” and stressing the lack of due process. An attorney for the Justice Department, meanwhile, leaned hard on the national security rationale the administration is now using to defend the ban and insisting that the president is the ultimate decisionmaker for who can access the White House.

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Judge grills DOJ attorney about Trump’s national security defense of press ban

The news outlets are asking Kelly to immediately restore their access while the case plays out.

Kelly promised a ruling “as soon as I can.”

Here are the key moments from the hearing:

Kelly, who was appointed to bench during the first Trump term, kicked off the hearing by nodding to an irony in him being assigned this case: He oversaw a case challenging Trump’s first major effort, in 2018, to boot a reporter from the White House.

In that case, concerning the revocation of the White House press badge held by then-CNN journalist Jim Acosta, Kelly issued a temporary order reviving Acosta’s access , relying on a 1977 precedent establishing that press pass holders were entitled to due process before their White House access was yanked.

“I was assigned to the Acosta case many years ago, and I was as surprised as everyone when I dug in to look at the law in Sherrill,” Kelly said, referring to the 1977 case.

He declined to say whether he thought that and related precedents were correct. But, he said, “certainly as a district judge I have to apply them, and I think it is fair to say that the processes that the court laid out in these cases … wasn’t played out here.”

Ted Boutrous, the attorney for the news organizations, pushed back on an idea put forward by the administration that letters from the White House sent to the three outlets Tuesday night about the ban were enough to overcome the due process claims the news organizations are making in the case.

The White House letters were “post hoc” and “pretextual,” Boutrous said, and didn’t meet the requirement, under precedent, that the government give clear standards and notice before shutting a journalist out of the White House. The letters described several stories by the reporters as posing national security risks. Boutrous called those articles “garden variety reporting.”

He noted among the multiple stories cited in the letter to CNN, only one had been written by a journalist with a hard pass – the badge that gives reporters regular access to the White House. The journalist wrote the story in question, about the plans to build a bunker under the East Wing ballroom construction, and had her badge renewed over the summer, several months after the story was published.

Boutrous also zeroed in on the national security arguments the White House is now pointing to. He argued that the rationale was cooked up after the fact, and that the reasoning violates constitutional protections for journalists.

“What the president is objecting to is the very essence of the First Amendment,” Boutrous said.

Kelly had some questions testing whether there was a scenario where a national security rationale would even be an appropriate reason for cutting off a reporter’s White House access.

His first question raised a hypothetical that a reporter was passing along classified information to a foreign enemy. In response, Boutrous stressed that the current circumstances are very different than that scenario. But he acknowledged that if the Secret Service – when vetting whether a hard pass applicant posed a physical security risk to the president – turned up that kind of concern, the White House could act on it.

Kelly then asked whether the content of a story published by a reporter could pose a national security risk justifying a ban from the White House. Boutrous stood firm against that kind of rationale.

“Once you go down that road, it is … blatant viewpoint discrimination,” Boutros said.

The Trump administration said that the issue was straightforward: Trump has the right to decide who can access the White House.

The argument from Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik aimed to undercut allegations that the White House violated due process by banning reporters without advance warning.

Trump’s decision, Velchik said, followed the guidelines created by previous court rulings that say outlets must have the ability to appeal any suspension or revocation. Tuesday’s letters from White House to the outlets said that by this Friday afternoon, the journalists could lodge their objections to the ban and then a final determination would be made.

But the judge noted that this process was put into place only after the revocation was announced. And, Kelly said, the journalists claim they weren’t even made aware of any new requirements for having a press pass, nor were they warned they had violated those requirements.

Velchik also argued that the outlets whose access was revoked endangered national security with their reporting, which constituted enough of a reason to immediately restrict their access. Those concerns are of utmost importance now, he said, because Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting Washington, DC, this week.

CNN’s Holmes Lybrand and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.

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在周三举行的一场 45 分钟的听证会上，一名联邦法官正在权衡是否恢复 CNN、MS NOW 和 Politico 进入白宫的权限。这场听证会旨在挑战唐纳德·特朗普总统上周晚些时候宣布的对这三家媒体的禁令。

首先，蒂莫西·凯利法官指出，白宫在撤销记者采访资格之前，似乎并未按照相关法院判例给予记者适当的正当程序。但他同时提出问题，旨在检验这些媒体针对政府以国家安全为由为禁令辩护的论点的说服力。

听证会涵盖了新闻机构的主要论点。媒体公司的律师告诉法官，特朗普此举攻击的是“第一修正案的本质”，并强调缺乏正当程序。与此同时，司法部的律师则着重强调政府目前用来为禁令辩护的国家安全理由，并坚称总统才是决定谁能进入白宫的最终人选。

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法官就特朗普以国家安全为由对新闻禁令进行辩护一事质询司法部律师

在案件审理期间，各新闻媒体要求凯利立即恢复他们的采访权限。

凯利承诺“尽快”做出裁决。

以下是听证会的关键时刻：

凯利在特朗普第一任期内被任命为法官，他在听证会开始时提到，他被指派审理此案颇具讽刺意味：他曾负责审理过一起挑战特朗普在 2018 年首次重大举措的案件，当时特朗普试图将一名记者赶出白宫。

当时，CNN 记者吉姆·阿科斯塔的白宫记者证被吊销，凯利法官依据 1977 年的一项先例发布了一项临时命令，恢复了阿科斯塔的白宫记者证使用权。该先例确立，记者证持有者在被取消白宫记者证使用权之前，有权获得正当程序。

“多年前我被指派负责阿科斯塔案，当我深入研究谢里尔案的法律时，我和大家一样感到惊讶，”凯利说，他指的是 1977 年的这起案件。

他拒绝透露他是否认为该判例​​及相关判例正确。但他表示，“作为一名地区法官，我当然必须适用这些判例，而且我认为可以公平地说，法院在这些案件中规定的程序……在这里并没有得到执行。”

新闻机构的律师泰德·布特鲁斯反驳了政府提出的观点，即白宫周二晚上向这三家媒体发出的关于禁令的信件足以推翻新闻机构在此案中提出的正当程序主张。

布特鲁斯表示，白宫的信函是“事后诸葛亮”且“别有用心”，不符合先例规定的要求，即政府在将记者拒之门外之前，必须给出明确的标准并提前通知。信中称记者撰写的几篇报道构成国家安全风险。布特鲁斯则称这些文章是“普通的报道”。

他指出，在致CNN的信中引用的多篇报道中，只有一篇是由持有白宫通行证（即允许记者定期进入白宫的证件）的记者撰写的。这名记者撰写了这篇关于在东翼宴会厅下方建造掩体的计划的报道，并在报道发表几个月后的夏季更新了她的通行证。

布特鲁斯还重点抨击了白宫目前提出的国家安全论点。他认为，这一理由是事后编造的，而且违反了宪法对记者的保护。

“总统反对的正是第一修正案的精髓所在，”布特鲁斯说。

凯利提出了一些问题，以检验是否存在以国家安全为由切断记者进入白宫的适当理由。

他的第一个问题提出了一个假设，即一名记者可能正在向外国敌对势力传递机密信息。对此，布特鲁斯强调，目前的情况与此截然不同。但他承认，如果特勤局在审查通行证申请人是否会对总统构成人身安全威胁时，发现存在此类担忧，白宫可以采取相应行动。

凯利随后问道，记者发表的报道内容是否会构成国家安全风险，从而构成白宫禁令的理由。布特鲁斯坚决反对这种说法。

“一旦你走上这条路，那就是……赤裸裸的观点歧视，”布特罗斯说。

特朗普政府表示，这个问题很简单：特朗普有权决定谁可以进入白宫。

司法部律师迈克尔·韦尔奇克的论点旨在削弱有关白宫在未事先发出警告的情况下禁止记者进入违反正当程序的指控。

韦尔奇克表示，特朗普的决定遵循了此前法院裁决制定的指导方针，即媒体机构必须有权对任何暂停或撤销决定提出上诉。白宫周二致各媒体机构的信函称，记者们可以在本周五下午之前提出反对意见，之后将做出最终决定。

但法官指出，这一程序是在吊销令宣布后才开始实施的。凯利说，记者们声称他们甚至不知道持有记者证有任何新的要求，也没有人警告他们违反了这些要求。

韦尔奇克还指出，被取消采访权限的媒体机构的报道危害了国家安全，这足以构成立即限制其采访权限的理由。他表示，鉴于中国国家主席习近平本周访问华盛顿特区，这些问题现在至关重要。

CNN的霍姆斯·莱布兰德和凯特琳·波兰茨对本报道亦有贡献。