Federal Judge
Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s White House Press Ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico, Citing Due Process Violations
A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, ordering officials to immediately restore the outlets’ press credentials after finding the administration likely violated the journalists’ due process rights when it revoked their access without warning. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly granted the outlets’ request for emergency relief just days after Trump announced the bans “effective immediately” in a Friday post attacking what he called the outlets’ “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS.” Secret Service agents confiscated the reporters’ press credentials at the White House gates the following Saturday morning, and the three news organizations filed suit that Monday, arguing the sudden revocation violated both the First Amendment and basic due process protections that require notice and an opportunity to be heard before a government benefit is stripped away. In his ruling, Kelly found that the journalists had received “no prior notice of the bans or an opportunity to challenge them,” a procedural failure he described bluntly in a hearing on the case: “I think it is fair to say that the process laid out in those two cases wasn’t followed here,” referring to earlier legal precedents governing how the White House may revoke press access. The judge also expressed skepticism toward the administration’s national-security justification for the bans, writing that “nothing in the record…suggests that the revocation…was motivated by national security concerns,” and noting that several of the specific stories cited by the White House as justification were, in his assessment, “routine” reporting that in some cases dated back months. Access was restored quickly once the order came down. White House Press Operations staff began reinstating credentials at 7:25 a.m. Thursday, Secret Service reactivated the affected badges by 9:07 a.m., and reporters from all three outlets were able to pick up press passes at the gate before 10 a.m., regaining physical entry to the White House grounds by around noon. The legal victory for the news organizations was amplified by a detail that added a layer of irony to the entire dispute: reporting has since identified Vice President JD Vance as the anonymous source behind the very Politico story the White House cited as a national-security justification for banning the outlet. According to multiple published reports, Vance was the unnamed official quoted in the Politico article that the administration later pointed to as evidence of irresponsible reporting warranting Politico’s removal from the building — meaning the administration effectively punished a news outlet for accurately quoting a source who turned out to be its own vice president. Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing CNN in the litigation, called Kelly’s ruling “a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law,” framing the decision as a broader affirmation that the executive branch cannot simply strip credentialed journalists of White House access on a whim, even when the president strongly objects to how his administration is being covered. Trump responded to the ruling on Truth Social by reiterating his criticism of the banned outlets’ coverage as “FAKE NEWS,” signaling no change in his underlying view of the reporting that prompted the ban in the first place. The Justice Department has moved to appeal Kelly’s decision, arguing in court filings that access to the White House complex is “a privilege, not a right” and that the executive branch retains broad discretion over which journalists may be credentialed to cover the presidency from inside the building. That argument sets up a higher-stakes legal fight over the coming weeks, since Kelly’s order was explicitly temporary relief pending further litigation rather than a final resolution of the underlying constitutional questions. Legal scholars who follow press-access disputes note that courts have historically been reluctant to let the White House revoke credentials based on the content of a journalist’s reporting, treating such revocations differently than routine security or logistical decisions about how many reporters can physically fit in briefing spaces. The episode is not the first fight over White House media access during Trump’s second term, which has seen repeated tension between the administration and outlets it views as hostile. But Thursday’s ruling marks one of the most direct judicial rebukes yet, with Kelly’s finding that the bans lacked any credible national-security basis undercutting the administration’s primary justification for treating this dispute differently than ordinary editorial disagreements. For the three affected outlets, the practical effect of Thursday’s ruling is a return to business as usual, at least for now, with reporters once again able to attend briefings and cover events from inside the White House complex. But the underlying legal fight is far from over, and press freedom advocates say the case is likely to be watched closely as a bellwether for how much latitude future administrations — of either party — will have to selectively restrict access for outlets whose coverage a sitting president finds objectionable. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other press-advocacy organizations have filed supporting briefs in the case, arguing that a ruling in the administration’s favor on appeal could set a precedent allowing any future White House to functionally blacklist unfavorable coverage by revoking the physical access reporters need to do their jobs. With the appeal now pending, both sides are bracing for a longer legal battle over the scope of presidential authority to control press access to the White House, even as the three outlets resume their normal coverage of the administration in the meantime under the protection of Kelly’s temporary order. The dispute has also reignited a broader debate over how White House press credentialing works and how much discretion any administration should have over it. White House access has traditionally been administered by the press office itself, subject to informal norms rather than codified legal protections, a structure that has generally functioned without major controversy across administrations of both parties precisely because presidents have historically refrained from using credentialing decisions to punish outlets over the substance of their coverage. Media law experts…
Federal Judge Rejects Maxwell’s Bid to Keep Sealed Epstein-Case Documents Secret
A federal judge in New York has rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s constitutional challenge to a law forcing the release of long-sealed documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, clearing the way for another batch of previously secret materials from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Maxwell to become public. U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska ruled August 12 that the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law in 2025, overrides the decade-old protective order that had kept the documents under seal. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal sentence after her 2021 conviction for sex trafficking, had argued the law was unconstitutional on three separate grounds, all of which Preska rejected in her opinion. Maxwell’s attorneys first argued the law violated separation-of-powers principles by improperly reopening a final judgment and directing courts how to rule in a specific case — in effect, they argued, Congress was doing a judge’s job by legislating a particular outcome in ongoing litigation rather than setting general policy. Preska disagreed, finding that Congress has clear authority to modify the rules governing grand jury secrecy through legislation, and that the original protective order sealing the documents was never meant to be permanent in the first place. The order, she noted, was explicitly modifiable “by the Court at any time for good cause shown” — meaning the parties involved never had an ironclad guarantee that the records would stay sealed forever. Maxwell’s second argument leaned on Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), which generally bars disclosure of materials gathered through grand jury subpoenas. Some of the documents at issue were produced by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the law firm that represented Giuffre, after the firm complied with a grand jury subpoena as part of the broader Epstein investigation; those materials were originally placed under seal by a March 2016 protective order. Preska found that Congress retains the authority to override grand jury secrecy protections through validly enacted legislation, undercutting Maxwell’s claim that the records were categorically off-limits regardless of what a later statute said. Maxwell’s third and final argument was that unsealing the documents now would violate her due process rights by stripping away a vested legal right to permanent secrecy that she claimed to have earned when the original protective order was issued. Preska rejected that framing outright, ruling that Maxwell never had “a vested right to total and perpetual secrecy” in the first place — a protective order, by its nature, protects information only for as long as a court determines that protection remains warranted, not as an unconditional promise that can never be revisited. The Epstein Files Transparency Act itself requires the Department of Justice to “make publicly available … all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” tied to a list of specified subjects, including Epstein and Maxwell by name. The law was the product of sustained pressure from lawmakers in both parties, along with victims’ advocates, who argued that years of piecemeal, heavily redacted document releases had failed to give the public a full accounting of who knew what about Epstein’s abuse of underage girls and when they knew it. Since the law’s passage, courts and the Justice Department have released multiple rounds of material, including a batch of roughly 3 million documents and photos made public by the DOJ in January, though critics on the House Oversight Committee have repeatedly accused the department of slow-walking the fullest disclosures and continuing to withhold material that lawmakers say should be released under the statute. Preska’s ruling did not set a specific date for when the newly cleared documents will actually become public. Records released under the Transparency Act typically go through a redaction process first, intended to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims and other private individuals named in the files who are not themselves subjects of the underlying allegations — a process that has, in past rounds of disclosure, taken anywhere from several weeks to a few months after a judge clears materials for release. It remains unclear from the ruling itself whether Maxwell’s legal team plans to appeal Preska’s decision to the Second Circuit, though her attorneys have signaled in past filings that they intend to keep contesting individual releases of sealed material as they come up, even as the broader legal fight over the Transparency Act’s constitutionality has now been resolved, at least at the district court level, in the government’s favor. Giuffre, who died by suicide in April 2025, sued both Maxwell and Prince Andrew in the years before her death, alleging she had been trafficked as a teenager. Maxwell settled Giuffre’s suit against her in 2017; Prince Andrew reached his own settlement with Giuffre in 2022. Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, a death that was officially ruled a suicide but that has continued to fuel public skepticism and conspiracy theories, adding to the political pressure that eventually produced the Transparency Act. Lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee, which has spent much of the past year pressing the Justice Department for fuller compliance with the law, have said they view the ruling as a significant step toward the kind of complete public accounting they have been demanding since the statute’s passage, even as they continue to argue that millions of additional pages remain improperly withheld. Whether this latest release meaningfully advances that broader effort, or simply becomes the next flashpoint in an ongoing legal and political fight over how much of the Epstein investigation’s paper trail the public is ultimately entitled to see, is likely to become clearer only once the newly cleared documents are actually made public in the weeks ahead. Preska’s decision is notable partly because it is not the first time a federal judge has sided with disclosure advocates over Maxwell’s objections this year. Her ruling followed similar findings from other judges handling related sealed materials from the broader Epstein docket, part of a pattern that has emerged since the Transparency Act’s passage: courts asked to weigh decades-old secrecy orders…