By Tim Balk New York Times
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The Associated Press said in a court filing on Wednesday that the Trump administration had defied a federal judge’s order requiring the administration to restore the wire service’s full access to the White House.

Lawyers for the AP wrote that a White House spokesperson had told AP reporters on Monday that they would continue to be excluded from the press pool — a small, rotating group of journalists who cover certain events in confined spaces at the White House — because the “case is ‘ongoing.’”

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For the last two months, the AP’s access to President Donald Trump has been sharply curtailed over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the name that Trump designated for the body of water.

In a temporary order last week, Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the exclusion violated the First Amendment’s free-speech clause and instructed the White House to restore the AP’s access “immediately.”

Still, on Wednesday, the White House continued to exclude the AP from the press pool, the filing said. It requested the judge’s “immediate assistance in enforcing” last week’s order, citing the White House’s “refusal to obey” the court’s decision. McFadden responded to the AP’s filing on Wednesday by scheduling a hearing in his court for Friday morning.

The White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A lawyer for the Justice Department, Jane M. Lyons, wrote in an email to the AP’s legal team on Monday that the outlet had not been allowed into the pool that day “because it was not its turn,” according to court papers.

But lawyers for the AP disagreed in their filing. Rather than restoring the AP’s access, they wrote, the White House on Tuesday established a new press policy that eliminated a regular, permanent pool spot for news wires at the White House and then declined to offer the AP access to the pool on Tuesday and Wednesday.

For years, the White House Correspondents Association, an independent group, ran the press pool. It had long granted access to three wire services: the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg News.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a recent memorandum that she would “retain day-to-day discretion to determine composition of the pool,” arguing that the approach was “necessary to ensure that the president’s message reaches targeted audiences.”

In a statement, a spokesperson for the AP, Lauren Easton, said the White House’s moves reflected a disregard for the “fundamental American freedom to speak without government control or retaliation.”

The White House has allowed AP reporters to attend larger, regular news briefings conducted in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. Since February, however, AP reporters have been barred from accessing the Oval Office, Air Force One and other places where journalists cover the president, according to the news wire.

The AP sued, arguing that its rights to freedom of speech were being infringed. A lawyer for the AP, Charles D. Tobin, said in a court hearing that the wire had essentially been placed in the “penalty box” by the White House.

The White House argued that it wanted to trim the group of the reporters who follow the president and to allow greater access for specialized news outlets. It said that it was not singling the AP out for punishment.

“The government repeatedly characterizes the AP’s request as a demand for ‘extra special access,’” McFadden wrote in his order last week. “But that is not what the AP is asking for, and it is not what the court orders. All the AP wants, and all it gets, is a level playing field.”

McFadden briefly paused his order to allow the Trump administration time to appeal. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is scheduled to hear the appeal on Thursday, declined to extend the pause while considering the case, so the order took effect at midnight on Sunday.

Articles from the AP, one of the world’s most prominent news wire services, fill newspapers across the country. And the AP’s guidance on style questions — including issues such as the name of the Gulf of Mexico — set industrywide standards followed by many American news organizations.

The White House has not stripped access from some other news outlets that have continued to use the phrase Gulf of Mexico. The gulf gained that name more than a century before the founding of the United States.

At the start of his term, Trump signed an executive order renaming it as the Gulf of America in the United States. He said the new name had a “beautiful ring.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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