Trump’s UN ambassador defends press ban as news outlets prepare legal challenges

(CNN) — First Amendment groups on Sunday rallied around the three news outlets banned by President Donald Trump, while one of the president’s appointees tried to defend the restriction.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico are preparing to take legal action, and many legal experts say they will prevail in court.

But Mike Waltz, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, argued otherwise in an appearance on CNN Sunday morning. Waltz was booked on CNN’s “State of the Union” before the ban was implemented.

“The president is absolutely within his rights to limit journalists to government facilities, particularly when, in his opinion, they’re not behaving as good-faith journalists. And that’s just not his opinion. That’s the Supreme Court’s opinion,” Waltz told anchor Dana Bash.

Waltz cited a 1965 Supreme Court ruling, Zemel v. Rusk, in which Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that “the right to speak and publish does not carry with it the unrestrained right to gather information.”

But the current dispute centers on a First Amendment legal concept known as “viewpoint discrimination,” since Trump has been explicit about his reasons for wanting to ban certain outlets over coverage he deems “negative.”

“Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine,” he said Friday in the Oval Office. “But I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house.”

A wide array of reporters have been welcomed onto the White House grounds for many decades. Trump’s restrictions are unprecedented.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to pick and choose which journalists are allowed to do their jobs,” National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. said.

Essentially, courts have ruled that if the White House decides to let in some reporters, then it can’t block others for the reasons Trump has cited.

Last year, when Trump briefly banned The Associated Press from some events, a Trump-appointed judge in Washington wrote that “when the White House opens its facilities to the press generally, as it does in the Brady Briefing Room, it cannot exclude journalists based on viewpoint.”

Thus, press freedom advocates say they are confident the courts will strike down the current ban.

“There’s going to be, in the next few days and probably by first thing Monday morning, filings by these outlets and their legal representation to demand an injunction from a court or hopefully even a temporary restraining order, which would move even faster, insisting that the pool move forward as it normally does,” Adam Rose, the deputy director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said on CNN earlier Sunday.

Conor Fitzpatrick, chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, warned on ABC’s “This Week” that the ban could set a precedent for censorship under future administrations.

“Once you open the Pandora’s box of censorship, you can never close it again,” he said.

Editors of other major newsrooms are well aware that Trump may try to ban their reporters next.

Partly for that reason, news outlets that fiercely compete with CNN, MS NOW and Politico on every other front have shown unusual solidarity.

The Washington Post said in a statement Saturday that the ban is “a clear form of intimidation to silence coverage, stripping the public of information and threatening our democracy.”

Fox News also showed concern about the ban on Sunday by devoting time to the subject on “Fox News Sunday,” its weekly public affairs program.

Jacqui Heinrich, who was filling in as anchor, serves as this year’s president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and on Saturday the association said Trump’s action “violates the First Amendment.”

On Sunday, Heinrich interviewed her predecessor, Weijia Jiang of CBS, who led the association for the past year.

“It is an absolute privilege to cover the White House and the president, and we don’t take that for granted,” Jiang said. “But when you start selecting who’s allowed to do that, the viewpoint shrinks, and it doesn’t represent, you know, the public.”

“And that’s what makes America so amazing,” she said, “the best country in the world, that we can have these differing viewpoints, that we can disagree, that we can bring different perspectives and different reporting to the table and allow people who are watching it and reading it decide for themselves. And so that’s why it matters so much.”

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Christian Sierra, Jordan Budney and Auzinea Bacon contributed reporting.