Kelly Restored 78 White House Passes, Not the Plane

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the White House to restore 78 hard passes for CNN, MS NOW and Politico before dawn on September 24. Kelly, named to the bench by President Donald Trump in 2017, froze the ban for 14 days on due process grounds and left the First Amendment fight for a later hearing. By Saturday, September 26, CNN was again off Air Force One.

Judge Kelly Restored 78 Hard Passes Overnight

Trump announced the ban on Friday, September 18, at 3:04 p.m. Eastern time, calling the three outlets fake news and saying the order was effective immediately. On Saturday morning, Secret Service officers disabled badges at the magnetometers and took the hard passes of CNN White House reporter Betsy Klein, MS NOW correspondent Akayla Gardner and Politico correspondent Cheyenne Haslett. Those three reporters joined their employers as plaintiffs.

The complaint in Cable News Network, Inc. v. Trump, filed Monday, September 21, sits on the docket in CNN v. Trump as case 1:26-cv-03287 in the District of Columbia. It names Trump, White House chief of staff Susan Wiles and communications director Steven Cheung. Lead counsel Theodore Boutrous Jr. asked for a temporary restraining order the same day.

Kelly’s eight-page temporary restraining order landed just before 1 a.m. Eastern time on Thursday, September 24, hours before Trump was due to host Chinese President Xi Jinping. The judge directed White House officials, except the president himself, to “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” the hard passes revoked on or about September 18. He set a nominal $1 bond, due by October 1, and kept the order in force for 14 days.

THE ORDER IN FIGURES

• 78 hard passes: Credentials Kelly ordered returned for at least two weeks while the case proceeds.
• Three newsrooms: CNN, MS NOW (the former MSNBC cable channel) and Politico, plus the three named reporters.
• 14-day clock: The restraining order expires on October 8 unless Kelly extends it.
• $1 bond: A nominal sum the judge said was unlikely to cost the government money even if it later wins.

Boutrous called the ruling “a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law.” The White House still had to put the badges back in reporters’ hands.

A Morning of Red Lights at the Gate

It did not do that at 1 a.m. Journalists from all three outlets tried the gate on Thursday morning and were turned away. Secret Service agents took hard passes that had not already been seized on Saturday. Klein, whose pass was taken on September 19, asked for it back and was refused. An MS NOW reporter’s badge flashed red at the scanner.

The outlets filed a notice of non-compliance and asked for an immediate hearing. Kelly gave the government until 12:30 p.m. Eastern time to explain itself. Micah Stopperich, director of White House press operations, answered in a sworn declaration from press operations that her team was notified at 7:10 a.m. Eastern time and that confiscated badges were dropped at the entry gate around 9:55 a.m.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 24

1. Just before 1 a.m. ET: Kelly issues the 14-day restraining order and tells the White House to restore the passes at once.
2. 7:10 a.m. ET: White House operations is told to start putting access back.
3. 9:55 a.m. ET: Confiscated badges are left at the gate for pickup, according to Stopperich.
4. After 11 a.m. ET: Klein is still denied entry on a later try, after earlier attempts beginning around 6 a.m.
5. Around noon ET: Klein and a CNN photojournalist are let in; MS NOW and Politico staff follow in time to work Xi’s visit. Klein said she was “very happy to be getting back to work here.”
6. 12:30 p.m. ET: Kelly’s deadline for a written account of the morning.

The declaration and the reporters’ morning did not match. Badges sitting at a gate at 9:55 a.m. still left people outside until about noon, on a day the president was receiving a foreign head of state. Whether that gap was a lag in the credential system or a choice is a fact the court file does not settle.

Why the Order Never Reached the First Amendment

Kelly granted the restraining order on the Fifth Amendment, not on the free-press claim that filled the complaint. He wrote that the outlets were likely to win on procedural due process because a White House hard pass is a liberty interest, and because no one got notice or a chance to be heard before the passes were pulled. The government did not dispute that last point.

The Justice Department had argued that access to the White House is a privilege, that the president may suspend it, and that post-ban letters dated September 22 supplied whatever process was required. Those letters accused the outlets of unprofessional reporting and of “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods.” Kelly called the professionalism standard “so vague it hardly does the trick.” He noted that the White House had renewed Klein’s hard pass months after some of the stories later cited against her.

Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns.

Judge Timothy J. Kelly, TRO in CNN v. Trump

Trump’s own announcement had talked about truthfulness and negative coverage, not secrets. Kelly found no classified or unclassified declaration explaining how any cited story damaged national security. Supplemental filings showed that, in most cases, the reporters who wrote those stories did not even hold hard passes. In the rest, the government offered no reason to think the pass was how the story was reported. He called the cited copy “routine.”

He did not decide whether the ban was viewpoint discrimination. That First Amendment question is still live. He also did not write a sentence about Air Force One, the in-town television pool, or a state dinner rope line. Those omissions are now the working edge of the fight.

Sherrill, Acosta, Karem and the Same Courtroom

Kelly said the motion was controlled by D.C. Circuit law he is required to apply. The 1977 Sherrill v. Knight ruling held that a bona fide Washington correspondent’s interest in a White House press pass is a liberty interest that cannot be denied without due process. The circuit’s 2020 Karem v. Trump decision added that a hard pass already issued may not be suspended without fair notice of the conduct and of the size of the sanction.

Government lawyers told Kelly that Sherrill and Karem were wrongly decided. He answered that maybe they were, but that a district judge is bound by them “full stop.” The Justice Department has said in this case that it wants that half-century of press-pass law overturned on appeal. Until an appellate court does that, the White House cannot yank a newsroom’s badges overnight and invent the paperwork after the lawsuit is filed.

Kelly has walked this path with this president before. In 2018 he ordered Jim Acosta’s CNN credential restored after a briefing-room clash, again on process grounds. Boutrous, who also worked that case, has described the new ban as the Acosta fight multiplied across 78 passes and three companies. The legal template did not change. The scale did. So did the government’s effort to dress a content grievance in national-security clothes after the fact.

A hard pass is being talked about in political argument as a favor the president may withdraw, a plastic badge with no constitutional weight. Circuit law still calls it a liberty interest. That gap is the case.

The Pool Went Dark, Then Flickered Back

Hard passes get a reporter onto the grounds. They do not, by themselves, put a camera in the rotating television pool that feeds every network when space is tight. After the September 18 ban, the White House also pulled CNN from that pool. Fox News, NBC, ABC and CBS, the other four members, refused to fill the hole until regular access was restored. For several days there was no U.S. network pool video of the president, including the first stretch of Xi’s visit. Chinese state television was there.

Reporters got back on the grounds around noon on September 24. The cameras did not. That evening, CNN and MS NOW staff were stopped from covering Xi’s arrival for the state dinner. A press wrangler told MS NOW White House reporter Laura Barrón-López, “I’m sorry, I can’t let you in.” CNN was told it could send a photojournalist and an audio technician, not a reporter and producer. Other networks sat out the greeting in response. Journalists for Chinese state media went in. Trump then posted that CNN had refused to cover a “made for Television” arrival because it did not want to give him credit.

POOL WEEK, SEPTEMBER 18 TO 26

On Friday, September 25, the five-network pool came back up. CBS worked the White House; CNN took the in-town assignment at the National Archives, where Trump and Xi viewed the Declaration of Independence. Anchor Pamela Brown said on air that CNN’s access had been restored and that the pool “appears to be functioning as normal.” That lasted into the evening.

Who Is Flying on Air Force One Saturday?

Friday night’s White House schedule note left CNN off Air Force One for Trump’s Saturday, September 26, trip to Knoxville, where he is attending the University of Tennessee vs. University of Texas game at noon Eastern time. CNN had been up in the television-pool rotation for that flight, covering the president for the other networks in the tight space of the plane. CNN said the note listed no replacement, which would mean no shared television coverage of the hop.

Kelly’s order talks about hard passes for employees of CNN, MS NOW and Politico. It does not mention the aircraft. Deadline and other accounts of the ruling note that the judge addressed credentials for the grounds and did not write a holding on pool duties or Air Force One. Boutrous has said the plaintiffs believe pool access “is covered by the temporary restraining order.” The White House is acting as if it is not.

The White House is barring CNN from flying on Air Force One on Saturday as part of the news outlet’s duties covering the president on behalf of major television networks. https://t.co/D16Sq92nYb

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 26, 2026

Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, said the network was being barred from flying as part of its pool duty. Jim Sciutto, also of CNN, said on “The Source” that the pool is “designed to document history, and it’s been in place for many decades under presidents,” and that this president “appears intent on trashing that tradition because of news coverage he does not like.”

WHAT THE TRO COVERS

• Hard passes: Immediate return of White House credentials held by employees of the three outlets, for 14 days.
• The grounds: The order is written as a command to restore access that was revoked on or about September 18.
• Process: A finding that the plaintiffs are likely to win, at least, on notice and a hearing before a pass is taken.

WHAT IT DOES NOT SAY

• Air Force One: No line in the order assigns seats on the plane.
• The TV pool: No line requires CNN’s turn in the five-network rotation.
• The First Amendment: Kelly declined to decide the viewpoint-discrimination claim in order to rule on due process.

WHERE LAWYERS DISAGREE

• Boutrous: Pool access is inside the restraining order, so leaving CNN off a travel pool violates it.
• The White House: The order restores hard passes; Friday’s schedule note can still omit CNN from the plane.
• The Justice Department: White House access is a privilege, and Sherrill should not control.

That is how a due-process win at 1 a.m. becomes a scheduling fight by Friday night. The gate opened. The manifest did not.

The Ban Returns to Court on September 28

Kelly told the outlets to file any motion for a preliminary injunction by September 28. The government must respond by October 2, with a final written submission from the plaintiffs due October 5. He said he will set a hearing later and intends to rule “expeditiously.” The current order runs through October 8. An appeal of the restraining order is not the next step; an appeal of an injunction would be.

Trump has signaled he will appeal and has called Kelly disloyal. In the Oval Office after the ban, he said, “I don’t want them in my office. I don’t want them here,” and described the policy as a response to “cumulative stories over the last few years.” He also called it “the ban on the free press.” The letters his lawyers later filed tried to move that fight onto classified-information ground. Kelly did not follow them there on this record.

MS NOW reporter Cheyenne Haslett’s Politico colleague got a day-pass offer at one point on Thursday, the workaround for people who do not hold a permanent credential. That is the smaller door. The larger one is the 14-day order, the September 28 injunction papers, and a White House that has already shown it can obey a badge ruling and still decide who rides the plane.