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Attorneys for CNN sent a letter to the Trump administration yesterday, demanding the White House restore the news organization’s access to Air Force One and the Oval Office or face more legal action.
“If the White House has an unstated policy of excluding CNN from the Oval Office and Air Force One as punishment for its reporting, that retaliatory and viewpoint-discriminatory policy would violate the Due Process Clause and the First Amendment for the same reasons underlying the district court’s October 13 preliminary injunction ruling,” attorney Ted Boutrous wrote to the Justice Department and White House counsel Will Scharf in a letter obtained by NBC News.
“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 added.
CNN has been barred from “fully performing its pool duties and has been denied access to Air Force One each time CNN has been scheduled to do so—no fewer than four times to date,” Boutrous wrote.
He said the White House has provided no written notice and offered no explanation for preventing CNN from fulfilling its White House television pool duties.
“Prior to the President’s Truth Social post on September 18, 2026, announcing that he was ‘banning’ CNN from the White House ‘as a result of’ its ‘reporting,’ CNN consistently had the same access to the spaces where presidents interact with the press as the other members of the White House Television Pool.”
Attorneys for CNN say that it is their “desire” to reach a resolution outside of the judicial process but that if access issues persist, “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.”
The White House doubled down in a statement to NBC News when it was asked about the letter.
“No person and no journalist has a constitutional right to access to the President’s Oval Office, Air Force One, or other sensitive and private facilities,” a White House official told NBC News. “When publications lie, fabricate, and ignore the truth, proximity matters less and they can write their fiction from outside of these secure facilities.”
CNN was scheduled to serve as White House travel pool as recently as last Friday — but its journalists were not allowed on Air Force One for Trump’s trip to Georgia.
When Trump barred CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds last month, the five major TV networks that make up the television pool, including NBC News, responded by declining to provide pool coverage for four days initially and then on two subsequent occasions when CNN was blocked from performing its pool duties: Sept. 25, when it was blocked from traveling on Air Force One for Trump’s trip to Tennessee, and on Sept. 30-Oct. 1, when it was blocked from traveling on Air Force One with Trump to a series of events in Oklahoma and Texas.
That meant there was limited video coverage of Trump for several days, including coverage of his summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his travel to New York for the United Nations General Assembly.
In addition, Politico was blocked from traveling on Air Force One on Oct. 5, making it unable to fulfill its print pool duties.
Last year, The Associated Press filed similar legal action against what is being threatened here. When the AP refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the Trump administration blocked print reporters from the AP from accessing Oval Office events and traveling with Trump on Air Force One for a period of time.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from carrying out what he referred to as “unlawful retaliation,” but a federal appeals court paused his ruling while it further considered the case. Oral arguments before the appeals court were heard in November. A ruling has yet to be issued.
