Blanche claims Trump ‘hasn’t denied access’ to White House reporters

Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday claimed that President Trump did not deny White House reporters access to the executive mansion, after the president banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW reporters from the grounds and had their passes confiscated by Secret Service.

“Well, the president hasn’t denied access,” Blanche told host Martha Raddatz during the attorney general’s Sunday appearance on ABC News’s “This Week.”

“That’s not the right way to describe it. This is what the president has said –– is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news.”

Blanche emphasized that reporters’ access to the White House is a privilege but said Trump made his decision “after years and years of one-sided media coverage” that was “not fair to the American people.”

A federal judge on Thursday sided with the three media outlets to immediately restore their press credentials. The outlets had filed a lawsuit against the administration. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee, ruled that the ban likely violated the reporters’ constitutional due process rights.

The attorney general said Trump had “every right” to bar CNN’s reporters from joining the White House press pool on Air Force One despite the ruling. He added that reporting that is “complete misinformation” rises to a “national security problem” for U.S. relations with other countries.

“What I’m talking about is the government’s position, and that’s what the Department of Justice said in court, which is the same thing that President Trump has said repeatedly, which is at some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy on the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue,” Blanche said.

Raddatz asked if this means reporters would be screened before joining the press pool on Air Force One, to which Blanche said no. Reporting on the president “doesn’t have to be good” or all positive, he later said before accusing the coverage of the president as an attempt to “diminish the Republicans and the Republican administration.”

The president initially said he banned the three outlets over their reporting before later saying last Monday that it had to do with national security .

“Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that day.

The focus on national security has been a blanket rationale for other legal tests against the administration’s proposals, including construction on the White House ballroom and the proposed triumphal arch . The Justice Department used this argument before Kelly, adding that coverage of the White House is a “privilege” and that Trump has the ability to “consider journalists’ viewpoints” when granting that access.