Blanche says ‘one-sided news’ is a national security issue worthy of barring press

By Aileen Graef, CNN

(CNN) — Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday that media outlets reporting what the Trump administration considers to be “one-sided” news is a national security issue severe enough to justify banning the press from gaining access to 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 attorney general’s definition of what constitutes a national security risk elaborates on a government claim made in a court filing seeking to justify President Donald Trump’s effort to implement such a ban against CNN, MSNOW and Politico, which a federal judge overseeing that case has greeted with skepticism.

Judge Timothy Kelly ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore the credentials of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico journalists affected by the ban, saying the revocation was done without “constitutionally adequate due process.” He also pushed back on the argument from the Justice Department that it was on the basis of national security, saying the articles cited by the government were “routine” and that the government’s arguments “offer little to back up their asserted national security interest.”

“For one thing, 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.”

The government cited reports from the outlets that referred to information provided by “senior White House officials” as a national security concern. Blanche said the administration’s concern was rather that the reporting was “one-sided.”

“What I’m talking about is the government’s position and what the Department of Justice said in court, which is the same thing that President Trump has said repeatedly, which is 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, and it’s not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it,” Blanche said. He did not offer any details to support his claims of inaccuracy.

In an exchange last week with US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins noted that one CNN report he cited about concerns over a shortage of munitions during the Iran War, was based on a Pentagon Inspector General’s report.

Despite being let back into the White House complex, the White House barred CNN from flying on Air Force One on Saturday as part of the news outlet’s duties covering the president on behalf of major television networks.

CNN had been scheduled to fly aboard the president’s plane on his trip to Tennessee for a college football game as part of the White House TV press pool — a small, rotating group of journalists that cover the president in areas where space is limited and share the information they gather with other TV networks. On Sunday, Fox News was allowed to handle its regularly scheduled pool duties for the president’s trip to Chicago, where he attended the Presidents Cup golf tournament.

In an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Waltz echoed Blanche, saying “media bias across the board” is something that “needs to be fixed.”

“There is a negative agenda. There is a negative narrative, and then we’re going to get anonymous sources. Heck, I just saw a story where anonymous sources were referring to a now dead senator. So, yeah, this needs to be fixed. And President Trump is quite frustrated with this, this media bias across the board,” he said.

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