CNN’S SUIT COULD SET NEW STANDARD
Alleges WH violated amendments, fed law
WASHINGTON — CNN’s lawsuit against the White House for revoking reporter Jim Acosta’s press credentials after a testy press conference exchange could test the constitutional limits of President Trump’s fondness for sparring with the press.
“The First Amendment protects ‘robust political debate,’ including speech that is critical of those who hold political office,” CNN’s attorney Ted Olson, a veteran Supreme Court litigator, said in a statement.
CNN alleges that stripping Acosta’s access to the White House violated the First and Fifth Amendments as well as federal law.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the lawsuit “grandstanding” and said the White House had to address Acosta’s attempt to “monopolize the floor.”
“If there is no check on this type of behavior it impedes the ability of the president, the White House staff, and members of the media to conduct business,” Sanders said in a statement yesterday.
But the case, should it make its way through the courts, could serve as landmark litigation that draws a bright line defining exactly where a president’s power is limited by the Constitution’s protections of a free press and due process.
Experts said the White House would likely be on the losing end if it decides to fight the litigation in court rather than restoring Acosta’s credentials, the result the lawsuit seeks.
“I don’t see how one looks at that and concludes anything other than it is content-based retaliation,” said Jeffrey Robbins, partner in the Boston office of Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP. “There is no nuance about it.”
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the White House’s actions have a troublesome chilling effect.
“It would be terrible for the public, and for our democracy, if reporters questioning the president had to operate under an ever-present threat of this kind of retaliation,” Jaffer said.
Trump is not the first president to openly spar with the press. President Nixon’s battles with the news media were legendary, and much more recently President Obama had an openly antagonistic relationship with Fox News.
But Trump has made attacks on the press a core part of his political agenda, from when he campaigned on a promise to “open up our liberal laws” so he can sue media organizations, to his repeated labeling of the press as “the enemy of the people.”