White House allows blocked reporters in after judge lifts Trump ban

The White House on Thursday began readmitting journalists from three media outlets — MS NOW, CNN and Politico — after a federal judge temporarily lifted President Donald Trump's ban on those outlets.

The move came after Secret Service officers initially barred some journalists from those outlets from entering the White House earlier Thursday despite the judge's order.

Judge Timothy Kelly ordered Trump and other defendants in a lawsuit by the outlets to respond by 12:30 pm. ET to their new court filing notifying him of non-compliance with his temporary restraining order against the president's ban.

The White House's director of operations responded to Kelly with a declaration that said the White House had restored press passes to the affected outlets.

Kelly issued his restraining order, which will last for at least two weeks, late Wednesday night. It directed the White House to "immediately" restore access to the three outlets.

The outlets had been blocked from entering the White House since Saturday, a day after Trump announced his ban.

The president had initially said he was blocking the outlets from the White House because of "cumulative stories" that contained lies about him and his administration.

The outlets in their civil complaint said that statement by Trump, and subsequent ones, bolstered their claim that he was violating their First Amendment rights to a free press by targeting them for what they reported about him.

In his order Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, Kelly said the three outlets had shown they were likely to win their lawsuit challenging Trump's ban, "at least on their Fifth Amendment due process claim."

The judge, whom Trump appointed in 2017, said the ban appeared to clearly violate two federal appeals court rulings that require advance notice and an opportunity to be heard to journalists whose White House press passes are targeted for revocation.

Kelly said he was bound to follow the rulings in those cases, "full stop," which were issued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Trump did not warn the outlets he wanted to bar them before imposing his ban. The Justice Department issued explanations for the ban to the outlets on Tuesday, a day after they sued to block the ban.

Kelly, in his ruling, also said he was "skeptical" of the Justice Department's claims that Trump was actually motivated by a need to safeguard national security in revoking the outlets' access.

"Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs' hard passes was motivated by national security concerns," Kelly wrote.

"Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was 'banning' Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs' reporting."

Kelly also said that "nothing" in the letters to the outlets citing their purported endangering of national security with their reports suggests an urgent need to ban them.

"Indeed, some of the reporting identified by Defendants in the letters to Plaintiffs stretches back months or years," Kelly wrote.

"Simply put — the record lacks factual support for Defendants' contention that the revocation of Plaintiffs' hard passes will in fact protect national security or that national security will be endangered if the Court orders their passes reinstated while this litigation proceeds," the judge wrote.

Kelly declined to grant a request by the Justice Department to delay the temporary restraining order against Trump's ban from taking effect immediately.

And Kelly noted that "temporary restraining orders are generally unappealable."

The White House didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment on the ruling.

A lawyer for the outlets, Theodore Boutrous Jr., welcomed Kelly's ruling order, calling it "a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law."

"We greatly appreciate the court's swift action," Boutrous said in a statement.

Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.