White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during the daily briefing at the White House on March 26, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Associated Press and the Trump administration delivered arguments in federal court Thursday in a case that could alter decades of established press access in the White House.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden for the District of Columbia heard details from the AP’s White House reporter and photographer about their exclusion for the last 44 days from joining their competitors and peers in witnessing President Donald Trump’s events in the Oval Office.
The two journalists, and other AP reporters, have also been refused entry to most larger White House events, including in the East Room, and the tarmac for Air Force One departures.
The AP, which has been a member of the White House press pool since the 19th century, maintains that the sudden ban violates its First Amendment and due process rights and has hurt its competitiveness as a wire service that reaches thousands of newsrooms.
The AP continues to have access to the daily White House press briefings and the driveway near the West Wing entrance, along with over 1,000 other journalists who have “hard passes” to the general White House elaborate — an argument Trump officials have made to prove they are not altogether banning the wire service.
The news organization is seeking a preliminary injunction mandating the administration immediately cease barring the AP from events that are open to a circumscribed number of credentialed press and rescind its policy excluding the outlet from the smaller daily White House press pool. Such an action would likely last until a final judgment is reached.
McFadden, who was appointed to the D.C. Circuit by Trump in 2017 and confirmed by the Senate in a 84-10 vote, asked the parties to halt any other evidence submissions so that he can rule in a timely manner.
At a hearing Feb. 24, McFadden rejected the AP’s request for a ephemeral restraining order that would have required the White House to immediately restore its access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and other places.
‘The president wasn’t cheerful’
White House chief correspondent Zeke Miller testified that Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, summoned him on Feb. 11 to say “the president wasn’t happy” that the AP continued to exploit the name Gulf of Mexico after he had ordered the U.S. coastal waters should be called the Gulf of America.
“He had decided we wouldn’t be permitted into the Oval Office if we didn’t change our policy and that we should ‘act quickly’ to (change it),” Miller recalled of Leavitt’s message.
The AP has not changed its style guidance because the Gulf of Mexico shares borders with Mexico and Cuba, and the AP’s coverage reaches global clients and readers that have recognized the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico for centuries.
When asked by the AP’s legal counsel if the modern policy has chilled the AP’s coverage, Miller said “undoubtedly our reporting has suffered.”
Miller, a White House reporter for just over 12 years, said before Feb. 11 he would regularly see his own news alerts pop up on his cell phone “while the event was still going.”
The wire service, which transmits news and photos in near real-time to subscriber members around the world, is now spending time independently verifying reports from other outlets or relying on delayed video feeds that do not show who else is with the president or his environment, Miller said.
“We don’t know what those other outlets are including or not including,” he said, especially when those outlets may fear the “viewpoint discrimination” the AP contends it’s faced from the Trump administration.
Miller testified neither he nor his White House colleagues have been permitted with other reporters in the Oval Office since Feb. 11, and that they have only been intermittently admitted to press conferences with foreign leaders or ceremonies in larger spaces, including the East Room, which can hold over 100 journalists.
The news outlet has had to fly its foreign correspondents to the United States to be part of the foreign press permitted in the Oval Office during visits from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, according to the news organization.
While the White House has admitted AP photographers to some events in the East Room, they’ve been shut out of others.
Evan Vucci, the AP’s chief Washington photographer, testified “there’s no rhyme or reason.” The “only thing that’s consistent” is that the AP has been targeted, Vucci said.
White House defense
The government called no witnesses but instead filed a last-minute supplemental declaration Wednesday from Taylor Budowich, White House deputy chief of staff and Cabinet secretary, and lead defendant in the case.
The AP moved to strike the declaration Wednesday, arguing the judge had ordered live witnesses, but McFadden denied the motion Thursday.
Budowich contends the wire services, TV and radio correspondents and print reporters that comprised the smaller press pool “under the old system continue to be eligible for pool selection in the new system.”
Leavitt announced Feb. 25 that going forward, the White House would choose which journalists can access the Oval Office and Air Force One — breaking decades of agreement between numerous administrations and the White House Correspondents Association.
The independent group, made of journalists, has self-governed since the Eisenhower administration, operating on the principle that the press corps, not the president, should determine the makeup of the press pool that accompanies the president almost everywhere.
Under the modern pool system, White House officials “have been empowered to better perform their jobs by creating a pool that best serves the public by pairing the topics of each event with the reporters and audience who are most curious about them,” Budowich stated in his declaration.
But AP attorney Charles Tobin said that argument “just doesn’t hold up.”
Showing the list of journalists chosen to be in the pool on Feb. 28 — the day of the explosive Oval Office meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy — Tobin pointed out that the White House had chosen The Los Angeles Times to be in the room.
But for the past several months, the LA Times’ coverage of Ukraine only consisted of republications of AP wire service feeds, he said.
By banning the AP, the White House is “shrinking” its reach to the public, argued Tobin, of Ballard Spahr law firm.
Tobin also said he doesn’t buy Budowich’s argument that the AP remains eligible to be chosen for the smaller press pool, pointing to the deputy chief of staff’s public social media postings and statements from other White House officials, all the way up to the president.
“If he’s saying it does not constitute a ban, then we don’t speak the same language because that’s exactly what he’s saying,” Tobin said.
In his closing statement, Brian Hudak, assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, said “we’re not saying they can’t publish (what they want), we’re just saying ‘You can’t go here.’”
Hudak also added that the president is well within his power to choose “a certain population of journalists” he wants to allow in the Oval Office and other spaces.
“I don’t think that offends the Constitution on the First Amendment side,” Hudak said.
How it started
President Donald Trump signed an executive order hours after his inauguration renaming the U.S. coastal waters along Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas as the Gulf of America. He also reinstated the name of Alaska’s Denali mountain to Mount McKinley.
The AP, which issues editorial guidelines followed by journalists around the world, advised it would continue using the Gulf of Mexico with the notation that Trump had renamed the portion of water along the U.S. coast.
The outlet, however, issued guidance for journalists to exploit the name Mount McKinley because the president can rename locations fully within the U.S.
In an attempt to avoid litigation, the outlet’s executive editor, Julie Pace, contacted Trump administration officials to discuss the action against the AP. But the AP ultimately filed a lawsuit on Feb. 21 as the White House and Trump “doubled down” on the modern policy, according to court documents.
White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles told Pace in Feb. 18 correspondence that the AP Stylebook, a detailed online and print guide for reporters and editors, “has been misused, and at times weaponized, to push a divisive and partisan agenda,” according to court documents.
That same day, Trump said the White House would “keep (the AP) out until such time that they agree that it’s the Gulf of America.”
As of a March 3 court filing, the AP said it was still banned from the pool and wider events that other reporters — even at least one that didn’t sign up ahead of time — were permitted to attend in person.
The outlet wrote in the brief that it “has repeatedly explained to administration officials that government attempts to control the words that journalists use — and excluding those journalists and retaliating against them when they do not comply — are unconstitutional and contrary to the public interest.”
A March 17 declaration by Miller lists dozens of events covered by the press pool at the White House and during the president’s travel that the AP has been denied access to.
Barring journalists for what they write
The AP maintains the Trump administration violated the outlet’s Fifth Amendment protections when the White House, without written warning and avenue to challenge, barred its journalists for “arbitrary and viewpoint-discriminatory reasons” from locations and events open to other press.
The outlet has a liberty interest in exercising its First Amendment rights, the AP argued, and therefore must receive due process if the government seeks to take away that constitutional right. And, the AP points to precedent set by the D.C.Circuit that the liberty interest in exercising freedom of speech extends to newsgathering.
Quoting the 1977 D.C. Circuit ruling in Sherill v. Knight — a key decision repeatedly mentioned — the AP argued: “‘Not only newsmen and the publications for which they write, but also the public at large have an interest protected by’ the First and Fifth Amendments ‘in assuring that restrictions on newsgathering be no more arduous than necessary, and that individual newsmen not be arbitrarily excluded from sources of information.’”
In that case, the Circuit Court ruled that press credentials to the White House could not be denied without procedural protections and that “the protection afforded newsgathering under the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press requires that this access not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.”
But the White House argues that the AP has no liberty interest in “having special media access to the president.”
“The Associated Press’s journalists continue to enjoy the same general media access to the White House press facilities as all other hard pass holders and continue to occasionally have special access to the President. The Associated Press’s special access is simply no longer permanent,” according to the White House opposition brief.
Quoting from the 1996 case JB Pictures, Inc. v. Department of Defense, the White House argued “‘the First Amendment does not provide journalists any greater right of access to government property or information than it provides to members of the public, despite the fact that access to government information ‘might lead to more thorough or better reporting.’”
White House press officials also maintain that the president has discretion over which journalists join him in the “most intimate of his work and personal spaces.”
Press pool history
For decades the White House Correspondents Association has included in the daily pool three wire service reporters, from the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg; four photographers, from AP, Reuters, Agence France-Presse and The New York Times; and rotations of three TV network journalists, a radio correspondent and a print reporter, according to an amicus brief filed by the organization.
The wire services regularly included in the pool have the largest reach of all news outlets covering the White House, and is why the association structures the pool as it is, according to court filings.
