The Associated Press amended its complaint against the Trump administration on Monday, including in its epigraph a punchy quote from an anonymous White House adviser: “The AP and the White House Correspondents Association wanted to f–k around. Now it’s finding out time.”
The unnamed White House adviser’s quote came about during an exchange on 25 February 2025 and was first reported by Axios last week.
The Associated Press filed its lawsuit against the Trump administration on 21 February, after the White House restricted its journalists from attending presidential events.
The decision by the White House came in response to the news agency’s refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” following an executive order issued by President Donald Trump that renamed the body of water in the US.
The AP claims that the actions of the Trump administration violate both the first and fifth amendments of the US constitution, and is an unconstitutional effort by the White House to control speech.
The lawsuit names three White House officials as defendants: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, and chief of staff Susan Wiles.
Last week, the federal judge overseeing the case, who was appointed by Trump, denied a request from AP to immediately restore full access to presidential events for its journalists.
The judge acknowledged that existing case law “is uniformly unhelpful to the White House”, described the White House’s ban on AP journalists as “problematic” and indicated that the issue needed more exploration before a ruling can be made.
Trump administration lawyers have argued in court filings that the AP does not have a constitutional right to what they called “special media access to the president”.
On Monday, the AP amended its complaint, nearly doubling the size of the document from 18 pages to 32, and once again asked the federal judge to reinstate its access to the press pool during specific presidential events.
“As the DC Circuit has made clear, journalists’ ‘first amendment interest’ in access to the White House, at events both large and small, ‘undoubtedly qualifies as liberty which may not be denied without due process of law under the fifth amendment” the amended complaint states.
“The AP’s liberty interest in access is rooted in the First Amendment’s free speech and press guarantees and its related protections for news gathering.”
The AP also highlighted and cited recent and ongoing instances of AP journalists being denied access and pointed out the recent decision from the White House to take control over which news organizations and reporters are allowed into the presidential press pool covering Trump.
The complaint states that “rather than heed this Court’s warning that precedent ‘is uniformly unhelpful’ to the government” the White House has “instead retaliated against the AP further” by abandoning the press pool system and “again barring the AP from the very same spaces – both small and large – that are at issue in this lawsuit.”
“The AP’s journalists are also banned from larger events – including press conferences with the President and other world leaders” it adds. “The AP’s journalists, despite signing up in advance, are turned away” and the result is that “the AP’s press credentials now provide its journalists less access to the White House than the same press credentials provide to all other members of the White House press corps.”
The next hearing in this case is scheduled for 20 March.
