A judge appointed by President Donald Trump knocked a hole in the president’s argument to remove media that he does not like — but the judge’s decision itself paled in comparison to the contempt the Trump judge had for the administration’s bad preparation, according to AllRise reporter Adam Klasfel and attorney Glenn Kirschner.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly of Washington, D.C., issued an injunction preventing CNN, Politico and MS NOW from being booted from the White House complex until the case is decided. However, language in the Tuesday filing appears to suggest the judge was ready to wash away White House legal arguments with a garden hose, said Klasfeld.
The judge flushed White House arguments to ban certain media organizations because it amounted to “viewpoint discrimination.”
Kelly sided with the news outlets, and he dismantled Trump’s argument using national security as a reason for the ban — reasoning that the White House hacked together after it snatched press passes.
“There is practically nothing national security-related in the record connected to the President’s decision to revoke Plaintiffs’ hard passes to which the Court can defer,” Kelly wrote in his 26-page opinion. “Moreover, even accepting Defendants’ claims that these incidents damaged national security in some way — a proposition that, as discussed below, they have not really tried to support with evidence here — such reporting is commonplace, for better or worse,” the judge argued.
But Kelly then seized upon the slap-dash way the White House cobbled together its argument: “Finally, it seems likely that if President Trump or another official would have banned Plaintiffs from the White House … Defendants would not have had to scramble to make their case with unsigned letters and a declarant who does not even work there.”
Klasfeld said it was a startling act of clumsiness to approach someone like Kingsley Wilson to frame the White House’s argument.
“Kingsley Wilson, working as Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense as the press secretary, does not work with the White House press pool,” said Klasfeld, “but they’re sending her to come up with the justification — after the ban — to pretend there’s a national security risk. … A lot of it hinged on this person.”
But what’s worse is Wilson’s background in MAGA bigoted corners. Klasfeld cited a Mother Jones story about Wilson’s xenophobic posts.
“She is now the Pentagon Press Secretary in the Trump administration, and she subscribes to the white supremacist idea that there is a plot to change the population of the United States to make it non-white,” said Klasfeld. “She is a supporter of the AFD, the German far-right party. And she is now the Pentagon press secretary and for some reason the Trump DOJ is going to her to file a court declaration to support the idea that certain press was a national security risk.”