The facts
Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday that media outlets reporting what the Trump administration considers "one-sided" news is a national security issue severe enough to justify banning the press from the White House and Air Force One.
"By the way, that is what is a national security problem. When you have completely misinformation, complete misinformation coming out of the White House, that affects our relationship with our foreign partners. That affects our relationship with our foreign enemies," Blanche said in an interview on ABC's This Week.
The ban targets CNN, MS NOW and Politico. A federal judge overseeing the case, Timothy Kelly, has ordered the administration to temporarily restore the journalists' credentials, saying the revocation was done without "constitutionally adequate due process." Kelly also rejected the Justice Department's national security argument, saying the articles the government cited were "routine" and that its arguments "offer little to back up their asserted national security interest."
"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."
Blanche, for his part, offered no details to support his claims of inaccuracy. "At some point, at some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue," he said.
Even with credentials temporarily restored, the White House barred CNN from its scheduled TV pool flight on Air Force One on Saturday for the president's trip to a Tennessee college football game. On Sunday, Fox News handled pool duties for the president's trip to Chicago for the Presidents Cup golf tournament.
Our take
Todd Blanche went on ABC and dropped the line that the national security problem is complete misinformation coming out of the White House. He meant to finger CNN. What he actually said is that the bullshit originates inside the building with the press office and the motorcade. The top law enforcement officer in the country just confessed on live television that the threat has a podium.
He never gave one concrete example. Not a single article. Not a single date. Just the stammering repeat that at some point the one-sided coverage becomes a national security issue. That is the sound of a man with an empty briefcase hoping the repetition will do the heavy lifting.
Judge Timothy Kelly read the same record and called bullshit. The articles were routine. The national security claim had zero support before the lawsuit. Trump himself announced the ban over negativity, not spies or foreign enemies. So the administration lost in court and answered by getting pettier: credentials back on paper, then CNN still barred from the Air Force One pool flight to the Tennessee football game while Fox handled the Chicago golf trip.
Blanche's own words now define the emergency. The misinformation that harms relations with partners and enemies is the version manufactured inside the White House. By that standard the press office is the leak, the podium is the vector, and the Attorney General just named the source on national television. The only thing left is to decide whether the confession was an accident or the first honest sentence he has spoken all week.
