Skip NavigationMarketsBusinessInvestingTechPolitics & PolicyVideoWatchlistInvesting Club
PRO
LivestreamMenu
- MS NOW, CNN, and Politico are set to sue President Donald Trump, seeking to overturn his ban on those three media outlets from the White House.
- Journalists from the three outlets were barred from entering the White House on Saturday after Trump’s declaration on Friday.
- Trump accused the outlets of writing lies about him and warned, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” in a Truth Social post announcing the ban.
US President Donald J. Trump looks on as he makes an announcement on healthcare in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., US, September 18, 2026. REvan Vucci | Reuters
MS NOW, CNN and Politico are set to sue President Donald Trump on Monday morning and to ask a federal judge to reverse his total ban on those three media outlets from the White House.
Journalists from the outlets were prevented from entering the White House on Saturday, a day after Trump announced he would bar them from working there.
“This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles,” the lawsuit says, arguing that the ban has already “severely impeded the ability of” the three outlets to cover Trump and his administration.
“Presidents from the earliest days of the Republic have disagreed with and complained about the tenor and content of press coverage of their administrations,” the civil complaint, set to be filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, notes.
But “the Constitution protects the liberty and property interests that news organizations and White House reporters have in their press credentials and the access those credentials afford them to cover the White House for the benefit of the public,” the suit says. “No official can deprive Plaintiffs of those interests on a whim — with no notice, no process, and no warning — as the President did here.”
Trump, in announcing the ban on Friday, accused the outlets of writing fiction and lies about him, and warned, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” in a Truth Social post announcing the ban. The president cited what he called “cumulative stories” by the three news organizations, adding, “You get sick of it.”
The suit alleges the ban violates the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution by failing to give the outlets advance notice and an opportunity to challenge it, without establishing clear standards for Trump’s decision.
The complaint also says the ban violates the Constitution’s First Amendment by retaliating “against protected newsgathering and speech.”
And it says the ban violates the First Amendment for a separate reason: it bars the three media outlets “from a nonpublic forum for unlawful reasons.” Those reasons include so-called viewpoint discrimination, or targeting the outlets for their perceived “motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective.”
In a joint statement on Monday, the three outlets said, “This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes.”
Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting,” the statement said. “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”
The White House and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC about the lawsuit.
The three outlets will file a joint motion asking a judge to issue a temporary restraining order barring Trump and other defendants from taking further action to enforce the ban and requiring them to immediately restore so-called hard pass press credentials to the plaintiffs, which give their reporters access to the White House.
In addition to Trump, the defendants are his assistant for communications, Steven Cheung, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles, and Sean Curran, director of the U.S. Secret Service.
The named plaintiffs are the three outlets and three White House reporters: Akayla Gardner of MS NOW; Betsy Klein of CNN; and Politico’s Cheyenne Haslett. All three journalists were denied entry to the White House on Saturday and had their hard passes taken away by a Secret Service officer there, the suit says.
On Sunday night, the White House removed CNN from its scheduled rotation as the pool network for the White House travel pool. The pool is set to travel Monday with Trump for his visit to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.
The lawsuit cites the White House’s removal of CNN from Monday’s pool schedule as an example of the ban “causing irreparable harm to” the outlets.
The suit is being filed in the same court where The Associated Press has a pending lawsuit against the White House for a ban on that wire service’s journalists working in certain restricted spaces in the White House, including the Oval Office and on Air Force One. The White House’s partial ban on the AP came in February 2025 after the wire service refused to reflect Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in how it routinely refers to that international body of water.
Trump told reporters on Friday that the latest ban is worth implementing, even if it is overturned by a judge.
“I think it’s good to point it out, whether it survives or doesn’t,” he said.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in a statement after Trump’s announcement, suggested he would lose a legal challenge to the ban because of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protections for the media.
“The First Amendment prohibits the president from punishing journalists because he doesn’t like their coverage, just as it prohibits him from punishing universities because he doesn’t like the courses they offer, or from punishing law firms because he doesn’t like the clients they represent,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the institute.
“With so many courts having ruled against him on exactly this point, you’d think President Trump would have learned this lesson by now,” Jaffer said.
MS NOW, in a statement Saturday, had said, “The White House belongs to the American people and the decisions made inside are funded by our tax dollars.”
“MS NOW intends to take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment rights and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy,” the network said. MS NOW also vowed to “continue to report on the President, the administration, and the issues that impact the American people.”
CNN and Politico issued similar statements, which referred to their constitutional right to report news without government interference.
White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich, in a statement Saturday, said, “The American people, through a free and independent press, must be able to scrutinize those elected to power, regardless of whether government officials view it favorably.”
“That’s why courts have repeatedly held that once the White House provides access to journalists, it cannot deny that access arbitrarily or based on the content of their reporting,” Heinrich, a Fox News correspondent, said.
In the AP’s lawsuit, Judge Trevor McFadden ruled in April 2025 that Trump’s partial ban of the agency’s journalists violated the First Amendment and ordered that the AP be given the same access as other members of the presidential press pool to the Oval Office, other restricted areas of the White House and Air Force One.
“The Court simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere — it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints,” wrote McFadden, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump.
“The Constitution requires no less,” the judge said.
Rather than allowing The Associated Press access to places the White House press pool goes to cover the president, the White House said it would abolish the so-called wire pool, which included the AP, Bloomberg and Reuters. The wire pool for decades had traveled with presidents to bring news coverage to news consumers around the world. It has not been reinstated.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, in a 2-1 vote in June 2025, blocked McFadden’s ruling from taking effect while Trump appealed it.
The panel heard oral arguments in the appeal in November, but has not issued a decision.
Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.
