Trump Keeps Contradicting the ‘National Security’ Rationale for Banishing Disfavored Journalists

When President Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House on September 18, he was clear about his motivation. Their coverage, he claimed, was “FAKE NEWS” full of “FICTION and LIES.” It was “purposely negative,” “one-sided,” and “never good,” he added. But after CNN et al. challenged their banishment in federal court three days later, the government’s lawyers offered a different explanation: The president, they said, was trying to protect national security.

U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee who issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the White House ban on September 24, was understandably skeptical of that rationale. And as the plaintiffs note in a brief they filed on Monday, Trump himself has had trouble sticking to the official story.

In a September 28 interview with Time, Trump reverted to his original justification for punishing CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. “It’s just bad story after bad story,” and “most of them are fake,” he complained. “I don’t think anybody should be forced to bear fake news, constantly bad stories, because I’ve done great things.” Although “I can name 100 great things I’ve done,” he added, “I never get good press. I never get fair press.”

Trump evidently forgot what his underlings had said in court five days earlier. CNN et al. had “threatened national security,” they averred, by publishing stories that included “sensitive or classified information.” Despite that invocation of “nebulous and pretextual concerns about protecting national security,” the plaintiffs note, “the President himself has continued telling anyone who will listen precisely what this ban is really about.”

Trump’s insistence on saying the quiet part out loud reinforces CNN et al.’s argument that his ban unconstitutionally discriminated against them based on viewpoint and retaliated against them for protected speech. Kelly, whose TRO was based on due process concerns, has not yet addressed those First Amendment claims. But he has made it clear that he is not inclined to credit the Trump administration’s post-hoc justification for excluding the three news outlets.

The defendants “offer little to back up their asserted national security interest to justify revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes,” Kelly noted when he ordered the White House to restore those passes. “The Court is skeptical—at least on this record—that Defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes.”

Kelly elaborated on that point: “Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House—instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche tried to resolve that contradiction during an appearance on ABC’s This Week the day before Trump’s Time interview. CNN, MS NOW, and Politico “refuse to report anything accurately,” Blanche said, and “that is what is a national security problem.”

How so? “When you have…complete misinformation coming out of the White House,” Blanche explained, “that affects our relationship with our foreign partners” and “our relationship with our foreign enemies.” The issue, he said, is “all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of what should be respected media outlets.” As evidence that “CNN doesn’t report accurately,” Blanche said “the information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks” is “almost 100 percent negative towards the president.”

Notably, Blanche did not say anything about “sensitive or classified information,” and his “national security” claim quickly morphed into Trump’s standard complaint that his press coverage is overwhelmingly negative. “At some point,” Blanche insisted, “the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue.”

Again, Blanche’s reasoning was hazy. “What every American should expect is that when they are told something on any network or when they read something [in] the paper, that it even has a whiff of impartiality, that it even has a whiff of accuracy about what’s actually happening,” he said. “It is absolutely the president’s duty to make sure that the American people are hearing accurate news. It doesn’t have to be good for the president. It doesn’t have to be everything’s positive about what’s happening in the administration. It has to be very accurate.”

Blanche, in short, thinks it is “absolutely” the president’s job to “make sure” that press coverage of him is “very accurate,” which is why he had to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. Also, it had something to do with “national security” because “misinformation” affects U.S. foreign policy interests in some unspecified way.

As the head of the Justice Department and a legal advocate with many years of experience, Blanche should be able to offer a more coherent explanation of the government’s position. His failure at that task suggests the challenges of scrambling to defend the president’s vindictive whims by portraying his petty vendettas as a public service.