AP asks judge to intervene after White House removes wires from press pool

The Associated Press is asking a federal judge to step in following a move by the White House to remove the spot typically reserved for wire services from the press pool covering President Trump.

The West Wing’s decision came just days after U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden ordered the Trump administration to restore the AP’s access to key White House spaces after it was banned from the pool over a refusal to use “Gulf of America” in its widely-cited stylebook.

“The new policy abandons the longstanding role of wire services, which have been included in the pool since its inception to assure that White House reporting reaches the broadest possible audience in the United States and around the globe as quickly and reliably as possible,” the AP wrote to McFadden in its filing. “This change marks the latest reduction in wire service participation, which the White House continues to use as a pretext for targeting the AP.”

The AP sued the White House earlier this year over the decision to ban it from the pool.

As part of the White House’s new policy, wire services will be eligible for selection as part of the pool’s daily print-journalist rotation but will no longer have a permanent slot in the group.

Previously, wires such as the AP, Bloomberg and Reuters were generally always in the tight circle of reporters brought in for pool events, which are then distributed to the wider press.

The move, which came late Tuesday after the White House hours earlier attacked the press over coverage of Trump’s administration agenda, sparked outrage from the White House Correspondents’ Association and other press freedom groups.

As part of McFadden’s ruling last week, the judge wrote his order “does not limit the various permissible reasons the Government may have for excluding journalists from limited-access events. It does not mandate that all eligible journalists, or indeed any journalists at all, be given access to the President or nonpublic government spaces.”

A White House official told The Hill all outlets will be eligible for participation in the pool, “irrespective of the substantive viewpoint expressed by an outlet.”