CNN, MS NOW, Politico Expand White House Lawsuit Against Trump, Citing Continued ‘Viewpoint Discrimination’

CNN, MS NOW and Politico have amended their lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s press ban at the White House, citing “continued retaliation and discriminatory viewpoint deprivation” by the Trump administration.

All three media outlets are once again accusing the administration of violating the First and Fifth Amendments.

The trial updates concern White House interference in the press pool, a decades-old tradition in which media outlets take turns covering the president closely, including Air Force One and the Oval Office.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has repeatedly excluded CNN and Politico from Trump’s Air Force One trips, even after a federal judge issued an order ending the initial, broader ban on Trump.

“To be clear,” the expanded lawsuit states, the media “does not claim an unfettered right to enter the Oval Office or travel aboard Air Force One. But once the White House opens these spaces to select journalists for news gathering and reporting, the White House cannot exclude plaintiffs because it does not like their coverage.”

Last week, the three media outlets’ outside counsel, Ted Boutrous, threatened further legal action if the White House continued to exclude journalists from specific areas, such as Air Force One.

Boutrous asked for confirmation that the administration would “abandon any policy to exclude CNN from the Oval Office and Air Force One” and stop preventing designated journalists from doing their jobs. The administration did not respond.

The filing of the file with the court on Wednesday afternoon therefore constitutes the next step.

The amended complaint asks the court for another ruling in favor of the media: “The court should declare the President’s ban on plaintiffs and the White House’s other unconstitutional actions, including his continued exclusions of plaintiffs from specific press areas of the White House for reasons of retaliation and viewpoint discrimination, unlawful, and enter a permanent injunction in favor of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico.”

The amended complaint comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Timothy P. Kelly granted a preliminary injunction restoring media access to the White House, finding that Trump’s ban likely violated the First Amendment by discriminating against journalists for their coverage of his administration.

Kelly previously issued a temporary restraining order on Fifth Amendment grounds. The administration is appealing Kelly’s decision.

When a CNN reporter asked the White House for comment on the amended lawsuit on Wednesday, a White House official said, “fake news has no place demanding a place in the president’s Oval Office.”

The White House complied with Kelly’s court order and reinstated journalists’ press credentials late last month, but CNN, MS NOW and Politico say the administration continued to retaliate against them by disrupting the press pool.

CNN has been banned from traveling aboard Air Force One six times when it was to serve as a designated television network pool since Trump announced the ban on September 18.

The role of the television pool is one that “CNN has served for more than four decades,” the revised lawsuit points out. The five major U.S. television networks have a well-established rotation, and other networks have shown support for CNN amid the conflict.

Politico has also been excluded twice from its planned out-of-town assignments in recent weeks.

And MS NOW “has not participated in the secondary television pool since September 18,” the day Trump announced the ban, the revised lawsuit says. The secondary pool spot is selected by the White House.

In blocking media outlets from fulfilling their press pool functions, the administration appears to be relying on an ongoing lawsuit involving the Associated Press, which sued last year when Trump blocked AP journalists in areas where space was limited for the press pool.

Trump took action against the AP because the news agency did not immediately begin using its new name for the Gulf of Mexico as he wanted.

In June 2025, an appeals court panel partially lifted the stay obtained by the AP and said the news wire was unlikely to succeed on its merits “because these restricted presidential spaces” like Air Force One and the Oval Office “are not First Amendment forums open to private speech and discussion.”

But the decision was “non-binding and unprecedented,” as Boutrous pointed out in his letter last week, so it is not binding on other cases.

The revised lawsuit claims that the Oval Office and Air Force One have been “two of the primary spaces with which journalists can interact, gather information, and publish stories about President Trump and other officials.”

“Although the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room remains a vital forum for journalists to gather and report the news, of the nearly 5,000 questions the President asked reporters in these traditional areas, 97 percent were either about the Oval Office or related to his trip aboard Air Force One,” the lawsuit states.

Boutrous said in a statement Wednesday that by excluding banned media from spaces like Air Force One, the administration continues to “violate the First Amendment and due process.”

“These exclusions, intended to punish and deter media coverage of the administration the president doesn’t like, make it more difficult for the press to cover some of the world’s most important events for the benefit of the American people,” Boutrous said. “CNN, MS NOW and Politico will continue to fight for their rights to report the news.”