The Trump administration must restore press credentials for staffers at CNN, Politico and MS NOW, a federal judge ruled early Thursday morning, delivering a rebuke to the president’s efforts to ban the outlets from the White House grounds.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, granted a temporary restraining order to the media outlets, after they sued Trump and other top administration officials, claiming violations of the First and Fifth amendments. The temporary order is set for a duration of 14 days. Generally, such orders are given to allow the court to consider a case more thoroughly.

“None of Defendants’ arguments convince the Court that Plaintiffs are not likely to succeed on their due process claim,” Kelly wrote in his order.

Trump has previously sought to revoke the credentials of individual reporters, but his latest ban was a sweeping effort to punish the media for negative reporting on him. Although the government later claimed national security concerns, attorneys for the outlets said that was a post-ban rationalization, violating their due process rights.

“Defendants offer little to back up their asserted national security interest to justify revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes,” the judge wrote. “So this interest does not tilt these factors in their favor, especially given that Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits.”

In a hearing on Wednesday, the DOJ pointed to letters sent to the media outlets outlining the reasons for the revocations, and giving them until Friday to challenge the action. But the letters were sent on Tuesday, four days after correspondents were first denied access.

The judge added that “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.”

The judge wrote that “even the justifications provided to Plaintiffs after this case was filed are ambiguous about the true purpose of the revocations: while Defendants’ letters to Plaintiffs mention national security concerns, they purport to identify reporting that ‘threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods’ leaving open the possibility that all the stories fall into the later bucket, rather than the former.”

Even after Wednesday’s hearing, and before the judge’s ruling, the DOJ filed an example of a story it claimed was a “violation of the standards of professionalism and decorum expected of those given access to the White House Complex.” It was an MS NOW report that Trump aides considered the possibility of renaming Ford’s Theatre for the president. Although Trump denied the story and lashed out over it, it had nothing to do with national security.

Earlier today, a collection of more than four dozen media groups and news outlets urged the judge to rule to end Trump’s ban. They included Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the White House Correspondents’ Association and 49 other media organizations. Among those signing on to the brief were the Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, the National Press Club, CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox News and the Dow Jones Co.

After CNN was restricted from the network TV pool rotation at the White House earlier this week, four other networks — ABC News, CBS News, NBC News and Fox News — said that they would suspend their participation in an act of solidarity.

Theodore Bourtrous Jr., lead attorney representing the networks, said in a statement, “This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law. We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action.”
Tom Tapp contributed to this report.