A federal appeals court in Washington pressed the Trump administration Thursday afternoon over its decision to bar the Associated Press from White House events, with one judge warning that press pools have long played a vital role in holding presidents accountable.
“During the Watergate period, the press pool was right in there with President Nixon,” said Judge Cornelia Pillard of the District of Columbia Circuit, pushing back on the administration’s argument that President Donald Trump can decide who’s allowed into his official events.
Justice Department lawyer Eric McArthur defended the decision to exclude the Associated Press, calling it a matter of “speech and associational rights.”
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden’s order reinstating the Associated Press, he said, was “not far off from a judicial decree ordering the president to answer a specific reporter’s question,” calling it a “dignitary harm.” McFadden, a Trump appointee, initially declined to lift the limitations on the outlet in late February, but reversed course on April 8 by ordering the White House to restore access to key presidential events.
At the center of the fight is the White House’s February decision to eject the Associated Press from daily press access after the outlet refused to start using the Gulf of America to describe the waterway that was previously called the Gulf of Mexico. The Associated Press, which maintains a widely used stylebook, said it would continue using the historically accepted name while acknowledging Trump’s change.
The case, which names White House staff such as press secretary Karoline Leavitt and deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, landed before a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit: Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, and Judge Pillard, an Obama nominee. The court is weighing whether to pause McFadden’s ruling while litigation proceeds.
Associated Press attorney Charles Tobin warned the panel that the White House’s actions amounted to unconstitutional retaliation. “Viewpoint discrimination is anathema to fundamental American doctrine,” he said.
Katsas questioned whether courts should wade into presidential decision-making.
“There are a series of presidential immunity doctrines … built into every one of those is that courts can’t probe the motivation of the president,” he said. He floated a hypothetical in which the wire service seat is simply eliminated from the press pool altogether: “We’re just eliminating the wire service, replacing the seat with something else.”
Tobin countered, “If a White House aide tells one of these reporters, ‘You’re not getting in because of viewpoint discrimination,’ then the court has every right to weigh in.”
Adding fuel to the controversy, the Associated Press accused the Trump administration this week of blocking one of its reporters from the Oval Office even after McFadden’s decision. The White House on Tuesday also stripped wire service reporters of guaranteed daily access to the president in response to the judge’s decision, setting aside a second slot for print outlets, including some wire journalists, in the rotating pool of reporters who gain access to Trump in small event spaces.
WHITE HOUSE BLOCKS AP FROM OVAL OFFICE DESPITE COURT RULING GRANTING ACCESS
The White House argues the Associated Press is not entitled to “special access,” and that credentialing decisions should remain at the discretion of the president and his aides. McFadden disagreed, finding that the administration’s actions were likely retaliatory and violated the First Amendment.
The appeals court is slated to rule over the dispute in the coming days.
