In extending an order protecting the White House press credentials of CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO, a federal judge expanded the constitutional reach of his decision into a First Amendment victory.
“Simply put, that was viewpoint discrimination,” U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, found in a 26-page opinion.
The Trump administration already appealed the ruling and has been looking for any loopholes around his order, which didn’t explicitly bar disinviting certain news outlets from Air Force One and similar restricted spaces.
During a 20-minute conversation on Substack Live, Glenn Kirschner and I called attention to a little discussed aspect of the ruling.
The Trump administration’s claim that the news outlets endangered national security largely hinged upon a declaration by Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson, whose history of extreme statements and sympathies were the subject of a Mother Jones investigation. She has spoken of her belief in the Great Replacement theory that immigrants are being lured to replace the white population. She has supported the German far-right party, AfD; and she rejected the historical consensus concerning the case of Leo Frank, a Jewish man whose lynching on false murder charges catalyzed the movement in the United States against antisemitism.
Worse, she’s not the only Trump administration figure with extremist views connected to the case.
Justice Department attorney Michael Velchik made headlines for his praise of “Mein Kampf” as a Harvard student and having written an essay from Adolf Hitler’s perspective.
In the video, Glenn Kirshner and I explain why that matters — and why Trump’s new White House press secretary may be off to a rockier start than people think.
Read the ruling in full here.
