A federal judge ordered the White House to immediately restore press credentials to CNN, Politico and MS NOW, ruling early on Thursday (September 24) that the administration’s national security justification for banning the outlets did not stand up, and that their exclusion likely breached the Constitution.
US District Judge Timothy Kelly – a Trump appointee – issued the eight-page temporary restraining order just before 1 a.m, directing the White House to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the outlets’ access for at least 14 days while the underlying lawsuit proceeds. Kelly found the outlets were likely to succeed on the grounds that their “hard passes were revoked without constitutionally adequate due process.”
The ruling turned on a direct rejection of the government’s stated rationale for the ban. The administration had defended stripping the outlets’ access as necessary to protect national security. However Kelly wrote in his eight-page ruling: “The court is skeptical – at least on this record – that defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes.”
“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ plaintiffs from the White House – instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of plaintiffs’ reporting,” the judge added.
That gap between the government’s courtroom defence and the president’s own public statements became the fulcrum of the ruling. Legally, the distinction carried real weight: excluding journalists over a genuine, documented security threat is permissible, but excluding them because the administration dislikes the tone or accuracy of their coverage amounts to viewpoint discrimination, which the First Amendment forbids. By pointing out that Trump’s own words undercut the government’s after-the-fact security argument, Kelly effectively found the stated justification pretextual – a conclusion that made it far easier for him to side with the outlets on their constitutional claims.
Kelly’s opinion also addressed the outlets’ broader First and Fifth Amendment arguments, rejecting the Justice Department’s position that White House access is a discretionary “privilege” the government can withdraw without explanation. He concluded instead that the credential revocations lacked the constitutionally adequate process the outlets were owed before losing access.
This is not the first time Kelly has ruled against the Trump White House on press access. In November 2018, during Trump’s first term, Kelly sided with CNN and its then chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, after the administration stripped Acosta’s hard pass following a combative exchange with Trump at a press conference.
“I will order defendants immediately restore Mr. Acosta’s hard pass,” Kelly had said from the bench, again grounding his decision in the Fifth Amendment, finding that Acosta had not been given adequate notice or a chance to respond before his credentials were pulled. Kelly was careful at the time to call the ruling “very limited” and left open the possibility that the White House could revoke Acosta’s pass again if it followed proper procedure, declining to rule on the First Amendment claims at that stage.
The parallels between the two cases are back in the spotlight now as both hinge on due-process failures rather than a broader First Amendment finding, and both saw the same judge move swiftly to restore access while leaving the fuller constitutional questions for later hearings.
That immediacy mattered this week too, because compliance proved rocky. Journalists from the three outlets tried to re-enter the White House on Thursday morning and were turned away, with Secret Service agents reportedly confiscating hard passes from reporters whose credentials had not previously been pulled. The outlets filed an emergency motion accusing the administration of defying the court’s order outright, and Kelly gave the White House a hard deadline – 12.30 p.m – to respond. The administration backed down, telling the court it had “begun the process” of reinstating the badges from 7.25 a.m, and by Thursday afternoon reporters from CNN, Politico and MS NOW were back inside the building. Ted Boutrous, the outlets’ lawyer, told Time it was “a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process.”
The dispute traces back to September 19, when Donald Trump announced he was barring the three outlets over what he called unfavourable and dishonest coverage. The move triggered an unusual show of solidarity across the industry: rather than cover for their banned rival, the other members of the White House television press pool – NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and Fox News – suspended their own pool coverage of the president ahead of his trip to the UN General Assembly. Wire photographers and major newspapers stopped publishing fresh images of the president too. CNN said at the time that “the public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information” about its government.
With the traditional press pool effectively dark, the administration launched a 24/7 YouTube channel branded “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” promising to put the administration’s “biggest moments all in one place.” Press-freedom advocates and Democratic lawmakers quickly criticised it as a form of state-run media designed to bypass independent scrutiny – a backdrop that shadowed the litigation over the ban itself.
Kelly’s order is provisional, not a final judgment, and the broader case – including the administration's authority to hand-pick which journalists cover the president, and the future of its in-house channel – remains unresolved. Further hearings, and likely an appeal, are expected in the weeks ahead.
