Thread: CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta

CNN sues President Trump and top White House aides for barring Jim Acosta

By Brian Stelter, CNN Business
Updated 5:47 PM ET, Tue November 13, 2018

New York (CNN)CNN has filed a lawsuit against President Trump and several of his aides, seeking the immediate restoration of chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta's access to the White House.

The lawsuit is a response to the White House's suspension of Acosta's press pass, known as a Secret Service "hard pass," last week. The suit alleges that Acosta and CNN's First and Fifth Amendment rights are being violated by the ban.

The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday morning. It was docketed and assigned to Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee. The judge has given the defendants an 11 a.m. Wednesday deadline to file responses to the suit. He has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday at 3:30 p.m.

Both CNN and Acosta are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. There are six defendants: Trump, chief of staff John Kelly, press secretary Sarah Sanders, deputy chief of staff for communications Bill Shine, Secret Service director Randolph Alles, and the Secret Service officer who took Acosta's hard pass away last Wednesday.

The six defendants are all named because of their roles in enforcing and announcing Acosta's suspension.
"This is not a step we have taken lightly. But the White House action is unprecedented," CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker said in an internal memo to staff.

Sanders responded to the suit by saying that CNN is "grandstanding" by suing. She said the administration will "vigorously defend" itself. (Read the White House's full response here.)

In a statement on Tuesday morning, CNN said it is seeking a preliminary injunction so that Acosta can return to the White House right away, and a ruling from the court preventing the White House from revoking Acosta's pass in the future.

"CNN filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration this morning in DC District Court," the statement read. "It demands the return of the White House credentials of CNN's Chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta. The wrongful revocation of these credentials violates CNN and Acosta's First Amendment rights of freedom of the press, and their Fifth Amendment rights to due process. We have asked this court for an immediate restraining order requiring the pass be returned to Jim, and will seek permanent relief as part of this process."

The White House Correspondents' Association said it "strongly supports CNN's goal of seeing their correspondent regain a US Secret Service security credential that the White House should not have taken away in the first place."

CNN also asserted that other news organizations could have been targeted by the Trump administration this way, and could be in the future.

"While the suit is specific to CNN and Acosta, this could have happened to anyone," the network said. "If left unchallenged, the actions of the White House would create a dangerous chilling effect for any journalist who covers our elected officials."

Sanders pointed out that lots of other CNN reporters and producers have press passes. But to many journalists and press defenders, that's not the issue. Echoing the views of many journalists, the correspondents' association said the president "should not be in the business of arbitrarily picking the men and women who cover him."

Trump's actions and threats fly in the face of decades of tradition and precedent. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have had a permissive approach toward press passes, erring on the side of greater access, even for obscure, partisan or fringe outlets.

The ACLU, in a statement supporting CNN, said "it is un-American and unlawful for the president to expel a reporter from the WH briefing room for doing his job. It shouldn't take a lawsuit from CNN to remind the president of the First Amendment."

The legal battle

On CNN's side, CNN Worldwide chief counsel David Vigilante is joined by two prominent attorneys, Ted Boutrous and Theodore Olson. Both men are partners at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

Last week, before he was retained by CNN, Boutrous tweeted that the action against Acosta was "angry, irrational, false, arbitrary, capricious content-based discrimination," and thus a clear violation of the First Amendment.

In an interview on Tuesday morning, Boutrous said CNN tried to resolve the matter privately, but the White House was not responsive so "we really had no choice but to sue."

"We didn't want to have to go to court. We wanted to just report the news," he said. "Mr. Acosta wants to report the news. CNN wants to report the news."

CNN's lawsuit cites, among other precedents, a 1977 ruling in favor of Robert Sherrill, a muckraking journalist who was denied access to the White House in 1966.

Eleven years later, a D.C. Court of Appeals judge ruled that the Secret Service had to establish "narrow and specific" standards for judging applicants. In practice, the key question is whether the applicant would pose a threat to the president.

The code of federal regulations states that "in granting or denying a request for a security clearance made in response to an application for a White House press pass, officials of the Secret Service will be guided solely by the principle of whether the applicant presents a potential source of physical danger to the President and/or the family of the President so serious as to justify his or her exclusion from White House press privileges."
There are other guidelines as well. Floyd Abrams, one of the country's most respected First Amendment lawyers, said case law specifies that before a press pass is denied, "you have to have notice, you have to have a chance to respond, and you have to have a written opinion by the White House as to what it's doing and why, so the courts can examine it."

"We've had none of those things here," Abrams said.

CNN's suit makes the same point.

White House's shifting rationales

Acosta found out about his suspension when he walked up to the northwest gate of the White House, as usual, for a live shot last Wednesday night. He was abruptly told to turn in his "hard pass," which speeds up entry and exit from the grounds.

"I was just told to do it," the Secret Service officer said.

Around the same time Acosta was denied entry to the White House grounds, Sanders announced the decision and claimed that he had behaved inappropriately at a presidential news conference earlier in the day.

At first Sanders accused Acosta of "placing his hands" on an intern who was trying to take a microphone away from him. In reality, Acosta held onto the mic, said "pardon me, ma'am," asked a followup question, then gave up the mic.

On Twitter, Sanders shared a distorted video clip of the press conference that didn't show the complete back-and-forth. The same video had been posted by an InfoWars personality two hours earlier.

The White House's rationale was widely mocked and dismissed by journalists across the political spectrum. And Trump himself has cast doubt on the rationale: He said on Friday that Acosta was "not nice to that young woman," but then he said, "I don't hold him for that because it wasn't overly, you know, horrible."

In Tuesday's response to the lawsuit, Sanders did not repeat her claim about Acosta "placing his hands" in the intern. Instead, she accused Acosta of being disrespectful and unprofessional.

As for the argument that Acosta isn't respectful enough, that justification "is not sufficient as a matter of law," CNN's lawsuit asserts.

"The content and viewpoint of CNN's and Acosta's reporting on the Trump administration—not his interaction with the staffer at the November 7 press conference—were the real reason the White House indefinitely revoked his press credentials," the suit states.

Acosta is on a previously scheduled vacation this week. He declined to comment on the lawsuit. Since his pass was suspended, he has continued to do part of his job, contacting sources and filing stories, but he has been unable to attend White House events or ask questions in person -- a basic part of any White House correspondent's role.

"Relevant precedent says that a journalist has a First Amendment right of access to places closed to the public but open generally to the press. That includes press rooms and news conferences," Jonathan Peters, a media law professor at the University of Georgia, told CNN last week. "In those places, if access is generally inclusive of the press, then access can't be denied arbitrarily or absent compelling reasons. And the reasons that the White House gave were wholly unconvincing and uncompelling."

Last Thursday, according to the suit, Zucker wrote to Kelly and requested reinstatement of Acosta's credentials. Zucker's message said that "no complaints were raised with CNN and there was no attempt to reach anyone at CNN before taking this unlawful action."

The next day, CNN sent a formal letter to the White House repeating the request and warning of a possible lawsuit.

Over the weekend, Acosta reported on the president's trip to France. Ahead of Trump's planned visit to an American military cemetery, he requested and received a credential from the French government, but was denied access by the Secret Service.

"It was not without irony to me that a U.S. White House correspondent who is an American citizen was denied access to a ceremony by his own government but was granted access by the government of France," CNN Washington bureau chief Sam Feist noted in a declaration attached to the lawsuit.

Feist said "Jim's ability to cover a public event of historic international importance was completely blocked by the White House."

A high-stakes case

David McCraw, the top newsroom lawyer at The New York Times, said instances of news organizations suing a president are extremely rare.

Past examples are The New York Times v. U.S., the famous Supreme Court case involving the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and CNN's 1981 case against the White House and the broadcast networks, when CNN sued to be included in the White House press pool.

The backdrop to this new suit, of course, is Trump's antipathy for CNN and other news outlets. He regularly derides reporters from CNN and the network as a whole. But he also seeks out attention from CNN and other outlets.

During his presidential campaign, Trump told CNN that, if elected, he would not kick reporters out of the White House. But since moving into the White House, he has mused privately about taking away credentials, CNN reported earlier this year. He brought it up publicly on Twitter in May, tweeting "take away credentials?" as a question.

And he said it again on Friday, two days after blacklisting Acosta. "It could be others also," he said, suggesting he may strip press passes from other reporters. Unprompted, he then named and insulted April Ryan, a CNN analyst and veteran radio correspondent.

"The revocation of Acosta's credentials is only the beginning," CNN's suit alleges.

You can read the full lawsuit here.
Correction: The original version of this article listed the former director of the Secret Service as a defendant; the actual defendant is the current director.

CNN's David Shortell contributed reporting.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/13/media...ump/index.html

Bob Woodward criticizes CNN's Acosta lawsuit, says media's 'emotionally unhinged' about Trump

By Gregg Re | Fox News
Published 2 hours ago
Last Update 1 hour ago

'MediaBuzz' host Howard Kurtz weighs in on why CNN's lawsuit against Trump is more about a PR battle than the law.

Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate journalist whose recent book, "Fear," described chaotic infighting at the White House, on Tuesday criticized CNN for filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration and charged that too many media figures "have become emotionally unhinged."

Speaking at the Global Financial Leadership Conference in Naples, Florida, Woodward said "the remedy [isn’t suing the administration]. ... It’s more serious reporting about what he’s doing.”

CNN filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday demanding that the White House restore the press credential of star reporter Jim Acosta. The administration suspended Acosta's "hard pass," which provided expedited access to the White House grounds, after he repeatedly refused to surrender his microphone while asking Trump a barrage of questions during a press conference last week.

“In the news media there has been an emotional reaction to Trump,” Woodward said. “Too many people for Trump or against Trump have become emotionally unhinged about this.”

Woodward added that CNN was taking Trump's "bait" by enlisting high-profile lawyer Ted Olson to pursue a federal case. "This is a negative," Woodward said, in comments first flagged by NBC reporter Dylan Byers. "Trump is sitting around saying, ‘This is great.'”

That sentiment was echoed in a piece in Rolling Stone on Tuesday by Ryan Bort titled, "CNN Has Played Right Into Trump's Hands."

"Too many people for Trump or against Trump have become emotionally unhinged."
— Journalist Bob Woodward

(Trump fiercely criticized Woodward after his book released earlier this year, saying "he’s had a lot of credibility problems.")

CNN's suit alleges that the White House violated Acosta's First and Fifth Amendment rights by punishing him for the content of his speech without providing notice or any due process, although the White House maintains that Acosta was penalized solely because of his behavior.

None of CNN's approximately 50 other "hard pass" holders has lost White House access, nor have reporters belonging to any other liberal-leaning media outlet -- although Trump has suggested that may change.

At the testy press conference the day after last week's midterm elections, Acosta continued to shout questions at Trump even after he tried to move on to another reporter, and he refused to hand the microphone to an intern who tried to retrieve it.

The litigation, which does not fully describe Acosta's actions during the press conference, also asserts that the Secret Service violated the Administrative Procedures Act by taking a final agency action in penalizing Acosta without providing any notice or hearing.

The suit, in arguing that the White House was lying about its motivations for taking action against Acosta, additionally claims that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders shared a "doctored" clip of the episode on Twitter. In the low-resolution .gif clip shared by Sanders, Acosta's arm moves slightly faster than it does in higher-quality footage of the press conference.

However, despite reporting from a wide variety of outlets that Sanders had shared a doctored clip, a Buzzfeed analysis suggested the changes in the video could have resulted inadvertently from the conversion of the footage to the lower-fidelity .GIF format, which is commonly used on Twitter. The format produces fewer frames per second than a higher-quality video source, making scenes appear to move faster.

White House officials, including Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, have acknowledged that the video was indeed "sped up" during the conversion process, while consistently denying that the clip was purposefully doctored.

The lawsuit states that Sanders used a bogus justification by claiming that Acosta had "placed his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as White House intern."

In responding to CNN's suit, Sanders on Tuesday said that Acosta's behavior had "impeded the ability of the President, the White House staff, and members of the media to conduct business.”

"After Mr. Acosta asked the President two questions—each of which the President answered—he physically refused to surrender a White House microphone to an intern, so that other reporters might ask their questions," Sanders said in statement.

"This was not the first time this reporter has inappropriately refused to yield to other reporters," she continued. "The White House cannot run an orderly and fair press conference when a reporter acts this way, which is neither appropriate nor professional. The First Amendment is not served when a single reporter, of more than 150 present, attempts to monopolize the floor."

Fox News' Howard Kurtz and Brian Flood contributed to this report.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bob...ed-about-trump

If CNN can sue the President, can the President sue CNN? I would think so!! You know, Trump has been champing at the bit to sue these suckers.

Published 26 mins ago
CNN suit against Trump is more about PR battle than the law

By Howard Kurtz | Fox News

Much of the news business is rushing to embrace CNN for taking legal action against President Trump.

The suit casts CNN President Jeff Zucker as a champion of press freedom, standing up to a president who is accused of violating the First Amendment.

But by taking the president to court, CNN also reinforces its image among millions of Trump supporters as part of the opposition. And the suit isn't going to get Jim Acosta's credentials restored any time soon, if at all.

Bob Woodward said at a conference that CNN was taking Trump's "bait," and he's right. But the network, in choosing to revive the Acosta controversy that was starting to die down, clearly likes the narrative.

"The First Amendment grants the right of all journalists to hold those in power accountable and ask tough questions," Zucker said in a statement.

But Sarah Sanders dismissed the lawsuit as "more grandstanding by CNN," noting that the White House has credentialed nearly 50 other staffers from the network. She said Trump had already answered two of Acosta's questions at a presser last week before the reporter "physically refused to surrender a White House microphone to an intern, so that other reporters might ask their questions." And that, Sanders said, wasn't the first time that Acosta had acted "inappropriately." (When Trump held his first presser last year, Acosta tried to interrupt by shouting questions after the president-elect had dissed CNN, and he refused to call on the correspondent.)

But Sanders notably declined to repeat her earlier charge that Acosta was suspended because he had "laid hands" on the White House intern sent to take his mic. The CNN suit calls that false, and video of the episode shows only glancing contact.

The network is seeking an injunction because "every day that his pass has been revoked is a First Amendment violation and it's irreparable harm in the words of the law," CNN lawyer Ted Boutros said on its air.

The suit is likely to drag on for months and is more about the high-stakes PR war between the two sides than resolving constitutional issues.

By going to court, CNN reframes the fight and deflects attention from Acosta's conduct to lofty principles. Even some of his White House press colleagues believe Acosta is a showman who takes an activist's approach to the job — he was lecturing Trump on the migrant caravan — and appeared rude when he kept on talking and interrupting. He's hardly the best poster boy for the First Amendment.

The president, who knew what he was getting when he called on Acosta, also gets use the correspondent and his network as a whipping boy in his assault on so-called "fake news." In fact, the lawsuit lists his previous clashes with Acosta, his criticism of CNN (including the famous wrestling video) and Trump's dismissal of CNN host Don Lemon as the "dumbest" guy on television.

Each side, in other words, is playing to its base.

Things have gotten rather personal between Zucker, who ran NBC when Trump was doing "The Apprentice," and the president, who clearly feels betrayed by the abundance of negative coverage on Zucker’s network. The fact that Zucker was a guest at Trump's wedding to Melania feels like ancient history.

I suppose it's possible that this suit will break new constitutional ground, but the great likelihood is that it will drag on for many months and do nothing to help Acosta. CNN has other White House reporters, but news organizations have an understandable conviction that no politician should be able to dictate who covers him.

But the risk for CNN, beyond big legal fees — the team includes Ted Olson — is that the network may be painting itself as part of the resistance.

Perhaps both sides are getting what they want. CNN has the backing of the White House Correspondents Association. Trump has the backing of millions of people who believe he's being treated terribly by the MSM. And while Jim Acosta may not have his hard pass, he's become famous. Maybe CNN should just let him host an opinion show since he's got so many of them.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/cnn...e-than-the-law

Fox News Joins CNN In Lawsuit Against Trump White House

Wed, 11/14/2018 - 11:14
806 SHARES

Update: NBC WILL BE JOINING AMICUS BRIEF SUPPORTING CNN: CNN
* * *
Fox News said it is supporting CNN's lawsuit to regain White House reporter, Jim Acosta’s, press credentials, and has filed an amicus brief in the case, Bloomberg reports citing an emailed statement from Fox News president Jay Wallace.

"FOX News supports CNN in its legal effort to regain its White House reporter’s press credential. We intend to file an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court.
Secret Service passes for working White House journalists should never be weaponized. While we don’t condone the growing antagonistic tone by both the President and the press at recent media avails, we do support a free press, access and open exchanges for the American people."

As we reported yesterday, CNN - which accused Trump of an “unabashed attempt to censor the press” by banning Acosta who has gained notoriety for his aggressive questioning of the president - filed their suit in DC District Court on Tuesday, saying the banning of Acosta is a violation of constitutional press freedoms and his rights to due process. Multiple reporters and journalistic organizations have expressed solidarity with CNN, even as the White House refers to the suit as “grandstanding” in their promise to fight it.
Several Fox News personalities spoke about the Acosta lawsuit in the midst of Tuesday’s news flurry. Judge Andrew Napolitano says CNN has a “very good case” to mount against the White House, though Acosta was thoroughly lambasted by Sean Hannity and Fox’s panelists on The Five.
Meanwhile, in response to CNN's lawsuit, the Trump Administration denied CNN’s legal claims that revoking the White House press pass of correspondent Jim Acosta violated his First Amendment rights to report freely on the government. The Justice Department filed a response Wednesday to CNN’s lawsuit hours ahead of a hearing in federal court in Washington.
And with neither side willing to concede, one wonders if the legal fight between CNN and the White House will eventually end up before the Supreme Court.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-...2JOcQ1eu-xx8uA

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