CNN warns Trump White House: Restore Air Force One access or face further legal action

The White House has been excluding CNN from President Donald Trump’s trips on Air Force One, disrupting a decades-old tradition of pooled TV coverage. Now an attorney for CNN is warning that the network will take additional legal action if the White House continues to prevent its news crews from covering the president. “These efforts to retaliate and discriminate against CNN based on the content of its news coverage are mistaken, counterproductive, and unlawful,” Ted Boutrous, outside counsel for CNN, wrote in a letter to the Justice Department on Monday. The demand letter stated that CNN “will be forced to pursue additional judicial relief” if the action continues. The letter is the latest extension of a legal fight that began when Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House one month ago. The banned news outlets sued, alleging violations of the First and Fifth Amendments. A federal judge intervened to restore access, first temporarily and then longer-term, while the lawsuit over the ban plays out. The longer-term ruling by US District Judge Tim Kelly issued a preliminary injunction in favor of the plaintiffs, saying Trump’s ban likely violated the First Amendment because it amounted to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Following the judge’s order, the Trump administration restored White House access for the banned news outlets. But the Justice Department has justified the ban in court, and the White House has sought other ways to single out journalists. Blocking CNN from traveling on Air Force One is one of those ways. The administration appears to be relying on an ongoing court case involving The Associated Press, which filed suit last year when Trump blocked AP reporters from Air Force One, the Oval Office and other areas with limited space for the press pool. Trump took action against The AP because the news wire didn’t immediately start using his new name for the Gulf of Mexico like he wanted. In June 2025, an appeals court panel partially lifted the stay obtained by The AP and stated that the news wire was not likely to succeed on the merits “because these restricted presidential spaces” like Air Force One and the Oval Office “are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion.” But the ruling was “non-binding and non-precedential,” Boutrous pointed out in his letter, so it is not binding on other cases. Boutrous also addressed the appeals panel ruling in the AP case by showing that the Oval Office and Air Force One have become the primary places “where the president interacts with the press by briefing reporters and answering questions.” In the second Trump administration, the president has fielded more than 4,700 questions in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One and on the tarmac. By contrast, he has fielded just about 150 questions in the White House press briefing room since returning to office in January 2025. So far this year, through September, Trump has appeared in the White House briefing room only 4 times, while he has held “43 press events in the Oval Office” and answered questions aboard and around Air Force One “51 times,” Boutrous wrote. The AP is still waiting on a decision from the full appeals court. Meanwhile, some of its access has been restored. The White House has not explicitly said that it is following its AP playbook in its actions against CNN. In fact, it has provided “no written notice and offered no explanation” for excluding CNN from recent trips, Boutrous wrote in the letter. The Justice Department did not respond to a CNN reporter’s request for comment about the demand letter on Tuesday morning. But in a combative statement following the judge’s longer-term order last week, a White House official said “the Fake News has no place demanding a spot in the President’s Oval Office.” ‘Those spaces belong… to all Americans’ The five major TV networks take turns providing pooled TV coverage of the president’s events and trips, and news organizations worldwide rely on the footage for their own reports and shows. On several occasions when CNN was next in the TV pool rotation, the network was left off the White House’s list, signaling that it was “being barred from fully performing its pool duties,” Boutrous wrote. Most recently, it happened last weekend, when CNN was supposed to provide pooled coverage of the president’s trip to Georgia and Florida but was excluded from the out-of-town travel pool. In a show of solidarity, the other major networks have declined to fill in when CNN has been excluded. The demand letter noted that CNN has participated in the TV pool and covered presidents in the Oval Office and on Air Force One for 45 years. “That is because those spaces belong not to any particular president or administration but to all Americans, and CNN and other members of the press serve as surrogates for the public when covering the White House,” Boutrous wrote. The demand letter may foreshadow new legal filings in the ongoing lawsuit by CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Boutrous wrote in Monday’s letter that CNN would like the administration to “confirm in writing” that “the White House abandon any policy of excluding CNN from the Oval Office and Air Force One” and stop preventing assigned pool duties. He included a Thursday at 5 p.m. Eastern deadline. “If these actions persist,” he wrote, “CNN will have no choice but to return to the court to defend its rights, and it is prepared to fight as long as is necessary to secure them.”