The fight between CNN and the White House over who controls access to the press room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue isn’t over. And likely won’t be for some time.
It began when CNN sued the White House when it banned Jim Acosta, who refused to stop badgering the president during a press conference.
A federal judge put Acosta back to work, but his order expires at month’s end.
When that happens, the anti-Trump network’s Brian Stelter reported yesterday, the White House will ban Acosta again. That will set the stage for CNN vs. Trump, Round 2.
But this time, the White House will lay better groundwork to deep six Acosta’s credentials for good.
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Mystery Letter
Stelter, who likely qualifies as the anti-Trump’s network No. 2 Trump basher, reported, “White House officials sent Acosta a letter stating that his pass is set to be suspended again once the restraining order expires.”
Stelter thinks the White House wants to lay a “paper trail” to establish good reason to get rid of Acosta. But Stelter didn’t quote from the letter directly or reproduce a copy.
He did spew CNN’s boilerplate answer. “The White House is continuing to violate the First and 5th Amendments of the Constitution,” CNN replied to the letter. “These actions threaten all journalists and news organizations. Jim Acosta and CNN will continue to report the news about the White House and the President.”
“Lawyers were already expected to be back in court this week to discuss the timeline for further proceedings,” Stelter reported. “Unless there’s some sort of resolution, CNN will be arguing for a preliminary injunction.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s information minister, “telegraphed” the move, the Washington Post correctly noted, when she said the White House would only “temporarily reinstate” the press pass.
Sanders appeared on Fox talker Sean Hannity’s program, but the host was her father, Mike Huckabee. “Freedom of the press doesn’t mean freedom to be disruptive, freedom to be rude, freedom to interrupt and impede the ability of colleagues from actually being able to do their jobs, as well as White House staff being able to do theirs,” Sanders told the former governor of Arkansas.
But Sanders also told her father that “we’ve laid out in a letter to CNN and their team what we think were some of the missteps that their reporter made at the press conference on November 7th.”
The judge said the White House can indeed send Acosta packing, Sanders said. The judge “was actually very clear that the White House has the ability to say, you can’t come in…. Freedom of the press doesn’t mean freedom into the White House. And he said there has to be due process. And so that’s what we’re doing and we’ll see what happens from there.”
Sanders and her father also correctly said the judge did not rule that the White House had violated CNN’s First Amendment rights. CNN, Sanders added, has 50 hard press passes to the White House. That makes it No. 3 on the list of news organizations with the most passes, she said.
The Fight
Those passes and CNN’s continued access was just one argument the White House offered to defend its move against Acosta. The White House argued that it banned him not because of his anti-Trump reporting and opinions, but because of his boorish behavior. The White House alone, it argued, decides who enters its press room.
CNN argued that Trump just doesn’t like Acosta or his leftist opinions. Thus, the White House trespassed its First Amendment right to report at the White House, and its Fifth Amendment right to due process in the way it removed Acosta, and, by extension, CNN.
The judge ruled for CNN and imposed a 14-day restraining order on the White House. If he does not extend it, the White House can boot Acosta again at month’s end. That, Stelter reported, is what the White House will do.
The question is this, as The New American asked last week: If the White House cannot ban Acosta after his shenanigans last week, what can it do, relative to controlling who asks what questions on its own turf? What behavior would a court consider prohibited?
“What would a federal judge do,” Mike Huckabee asked on his Facebook page, “if Acosta ‘challenged’ him in his courtroom and argued and wouldn’t shut up when [the] judge told him to and refused to give up mic when bailiff tried to retrieve it?”
Photo of Donald Trump: Whitehouse.gov
