At 1:49 AM Eastern, CBS tweeted, “A federal judge early Thursday morning temporarily blocked senior Trump administration officials from barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House and said their journalists’ press credentials must be immediately restored.”
This is the same judge who ruled in favor of Jim Acosta back in 2018.
Enough of this nonsense of allowing mere district judges to order the president about like this.
I do not buy that the restoration of the press passes was so important that we needed a ruling in the wee hours of the morning. The ruling came so late that even Matt Drudge and Kane at Citizen Free Press were asleep. X never sleeps.
Why was this kerfuffle such an emergency that Judge Timothy Kelly could not wait until 9 AM to hear the case fully rested and make a decision?
Trump should just tell the judge what Glinda the Good Witch of the North told the Wicked Witch of the West in Munchkinland, “Oh, rubbish! You have no power here! Begone, before somebody drops a house on you too!”
Defying the order is the only rational reaction. The nation needs to settle this question: Is Donald Trump the president or are the district judges in DC running the country?
My take is Kelly lacks the authority to run the White House. The president is not a puppet of any district judge, including and especially the ones he appointed. Trump picked Kelly from a list the Heritage Foundation provided in 2017.
The Senate voted 94-2 to confirm him. That tells me all I need to know about him. Give me a man like Pete Hegseth whose confirmation was 51-50. Anyone every Democrat senator opposes cannot be all bad.
CBS reported, “In an eight-page ruling, Kelly said the three news outlets are likely to succeed in showing the bans lacked due process, writing that the journalists were not given prior notice of the bans or an opportunity to challenge them. And he noted that some of the CNN, MS NOW and Politico stories that the White House cited as justification for the bans were ‘routine’ and, in certain cases, months old.”
If what CBS claimed is true—if lies no longer matter after a few months—then Judge Kelly has an obligation to free anyone in prison for perjury or fraud because lies now magically have an expiration date.
The judge said in his midnight madness, “[Nothing] in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. 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.”
So much for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Let’s get real, shall we? President Trump does not owe the judge an explanation.
Nonetheless on Friday afternoon when most people were awake and many workers were watching the clock tick down; Trump posted on Truth Social:
I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Fait accompli.
He does not need the permission of anyone to run the White House as he sees fit.
77 million people and more importantly, 31 states empowered him to make these decisions when they elected him president in 2024.
Certainly, Chuck Grassley’s lawyer, the job Kelly had before his appointment (which explains his rubber-stamp confirmation), was not appointed to be the lifeguard of the White House press pool.
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Officially the judge was the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Chief Counsel for National Security and Senior Crime Counsel to Chairman Chuck Grassley during Obama’s second term.
Before that, he worked for the Department of Justice getting his ticket punched beginning in 2003. His career began with the white-shoe law firm of Arnold & Porter after a clerkship for District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter in Philadelphia.
Judge Kelly is a man of achievement. He proved himself to the Heritage Foundation and the Senate. But his achievements show how insular the judiciary has become especially in the nation’s capital. The arrogance of his ruling shows how hostile the DC clique is to outsiders.
The fact that Kelly demanded due process shows that this is not about freedom of the press but that a simple tort case in which the president is taking a thing of value—in this case, access to the president—which requires the matter to be settled in court.
Trump revealed his decision on Friday afternoon, not one o’clock in the morning when decent people are asleep and dreaming of sugarplum fairies.
The demand for an emergency order runs counter to actions of the press, which protested the loss of access by subsequently refusing to cover the president. Huh? The boycott shows how unnecessary the press really is.
Obviously, I do not know the law. I barely know how to write, something most of us learn by third grade. (My grandson at 5 can write in two different languages and two different alphabets, the little showoff.)
But I do know a power grab when I see one. Since January 20, 2025, I have seen enough judges grab power they do not have to convince me the only correct course of action for President Trump is to ignore the court order because like the Wicked Witch of the West, Judge Kelly has no power here.
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This article first appeared on Don Surber’s Substack. Reprinted here with permission.
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