| On Thursday, the Justice Department will be back in court to defend the Trump administration’s effort to ban MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House. A fourteen-day temporary restraining order is set to expire, but it appears likely that the judge will extend that order in the form of a preliminary injunction. |
| That order, however, was more limited than many people initially understood, and it did not require the White House to fully restore the outlets’ prior access. The judge required the White House to allow the outlets back into designated press areas, like the briefing room, but allowed the administration to continue blocking reporters from smaller areas where Trump regularly takes questions from the press — including the Oval Office and Air Force One. |
| The distinction is a narrow but important one. “With this president specifically, because he does so many events in those other spaces, it really does matter that folks are in the room,” Eugene Daniels told me in an interview this week. |
| Daniels is currently the co-host of “The Weekend” and senior Washington correspondent for MS NOW. He served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from 2024 to 2025, overseeing the organization’s work and helping to manage relations between the press corps and the White House. He also worked as a White House correspondent covering Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for Politico, where we first met. |
| We talked about how the White House press corps and pools function, how the Trump administration has curtailed access for MS NOW and the other outlets — even under the current court order — and why it matters, particularly for an administration so hostile to outside scrutiny. |
| “With this president,” Daniels said, “you have to kind of be in his face to get answers.” |
| This interview has been edited for length and clarity. |
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| What’s the current state of play on the ground for your White House reporters? |
| At this point, they are allowed to go in the White House, and this is for MS NOW, CNN, and Politico, who were blocked as one on that day a couple of weeks ago. |
| What we have seen from this administration, though, is them blocking Politico and CNN from being able to fulfill their pool duties by not allowing them to travel on Air Force One. |
| What I’ve been really excited about is you’ve seen the press corps that isn’t directly impacted by this, but is indirectly impacted, standing up for their colleagues. You had Politico be blocked, and the White House was seemingly unable to find someone to take their spot on Air Force One as a print pooler. |
| It puts everyone at a disadvantage when there isn’t someone there covering what the president is doing, but it’s important for the White House to understand how important these moments are, and to be met with a unified stance from the media. |
| Can you explain the distinction between the print pool and the TV pool — and how the ban is frustrating these functions? |
| There are multiple different aspects of the pool. There’s an in-town pool, there’s an out-of-town pool, and there are other types of pools that are put together for the vice president, for the first lady, second lady, and second gentleman. |
| The print pool is a rotation of print — and now digital outlets, of course — but the print and digital outlets that rotate being the eyes and ears of the American people for what the administration is doing. If you are getting information from an event — information, not sound or video — you are likely getting it from the print pooler, because the print pooler sends the most detailed, the most up-to-date, the fastest pool notes. |
| Those pool notes go to, first, a White House Correspondents’ Association listserv, people within the WHCA. Then the White House — every White House — takes what is sent, and what they’re supposed to do is copy and paste it into a different email, and that goes out to a larger listserv that really anyone with the link could get. That’s how people find out things about what’s going on in the government. |
| The TV pool is separate, but when you say the pool is going somewhere, that means the print pooler is going, that means the radio pooler is going — that’s one human being. |
| | | “When you have one organization, or multiple organizations, that the White House is not quote-unquote ‘allowing’ to do their part of the rotation, that throws everybody into flux” |
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| The rotation of TV networks is the five networks: ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News. |
| Those organizations have for years handled their own rotation. They understand what it takes to actually do the job, so they handle their own rotation. That’s always been the case. |
| When you have one organization, or multiple organizations, that the White House is not quote-unquote “allowing” to do their part of the rotation, that throws everybody into flux. That makes it harder on the reporters. It is worse for the American people, because there’s a possibility that no one will be there to be the eyes, the ears, the microphones for them, on their behalf, at the White House or when the president is on a trip. |
| What we have seen with this administration is that when they took over the pool, what they also did was allow folks in who hadn’t done it before. If no one goes to the TV pool, for example, then the person that does go may be someone who’s never done it before. |
| We saw, the very first day that this happened, when CNN wasn’t allowed to go and do their job and no one else did in their spot, that the White House tried to use another news organization, that I won’t name. People can look it up. It seems like they had not done it before in the way that the pool requires, and the actual skill set it requires. |
| So we didn’t hear what the president said when he was talking about his helipad. It was just screaming into the void. It seems like something small — “oh, there’s an audio person that does this” — but it’s actually a whole human. |
| In the litigation over the White House’s ban of the Associated Press, a panel of judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals drew a distinction that the White House is trying to create on the ground with MS NOW and the other outlets. |
| They tried to separate parts of the White House that are regularly open to the press, like the briefing room, from the parts of the White House that, according to the panel in the D.C. Circuit, are more akin to private workspaces. Those include the Oval Office and Air Force One. |
| Can you walk us through what this means as a practical matter? Where can you typically go when you enter the grounds? |
| You badge in, and you go through Secret Service. You walk past the place where the TV news organizations are doing hits. So if you’re watching MS NOW and you’re seeing Vaughn [Hillyard] or Laura [Barrón-López] or Jake [Traylor] or Akayla [Gardner] or Jackie [Alemany] in their spot, you might see people walking behind them, but it’s probably reporters going to where we’re supposed to be going. |
| There are certain parts that have always been free-to-roam spaces. As you walk toward the White House, the first door that you will go to that we’re allowed to go into is the briefing room. |
| That’s the image we all know. That is the thing that people will see [on television] — whether it was Jen Psaki or Karine Jean-Pierre or Karoline Leavitt or Ari Fleischer or Dana Perino tussling with White House reporters. |
| If you continue going to the left, you will pass more TV, where the cameras are to shoot the press briefing and live shots. Then you’ll go into a space that is essentially where all our work is — it’s the news organization workspaces. |
| Depending on what kind of news organization you are, you may have a desk spot, you may have a room. If you’re a news organization that is TV, most of the TV news organizations have a whole room. The rooms are very tiny, to be clear. |
| What’s the area known as “lower press”? |
| When you’re watching the press briefing live, there [are two blue doors]. That’s where you walk through and you can see lower press. |
| This is where you have — we call them “wranglers,” but they’re press aides. Those are the people that, when you’re watching a press conference and someone’s saying, “Thank you, press. Thank you, press” — that’s those folks. It’s an entry-level position, so they’re usually younger. They’re the people that work most closely with us on the logistics and where we’re going. |
| That’s where they are. That is where some of the assistant press secretaries are, and everyone but the main press secretary. They all work in these little spaces. |
| At some point they stopped allowing reporters to just go up to upper press, and that is new. What used to happen when I was covering the White House is, if I wanted to go see Jen or Karine about a story — or the communications director, who is usually up there as well in that same space — I would just go up. I would show the Secret Service guy at the desk my badge, and I would just walk in. |
| People have been going up there for years. Those are the places that, without escort, White House reporters can go with a badge. That has always been the case, for the most part, until recently, where the White House closed that. |
| The reason that matters is because these people’s jobs are paid for by the taxpayers, so a reporter being able to go up to the press secretary for more information, going to the communications director without a babysitter, is actually important to the process. |
| When we see the president taking questions on a driveway, or when he’s about to get on a helicopter, can you tell us how that process works? Is the White House picking and choosing who gets to go out there? |
| Well, they used to not pick and choose. It used to be that the press pool was handled by the White House Correspondents’ Association, and by that, I mean reporters knowing what is required, reporters understanding what the job is. |
| That was always something that the WHCA handled, in conjunction with the White House — talking to them about who’s coming, letting them know who’s going to be covering that day, so they know who to wait for. If they know Politico is going to be in the print pool and they don’t see Politico, they call the president of the WHCA: “Hey, there’s no pool,” or “What the hell is going on,” right? Those kinds of things have always been handled by them. |
| If the president of the United States is there — let’s say he comes off of Air Force One — there was a group that went, but sometimes it’s everybody. Sometimes it’s open press, so that means that really a bunch of people could go, really anyone who’s at the White House covering. There’s a boarding process, but essentially everyone just goes. The people closest to the president are the poolers, so they can get the information and give it out to everybody else. |
| Does the administration exercise some control over this? |
| They have exercised a lot of control over it. Not full control — the WHCA still does handle the print pool — but the White House has added some folks. |
| Up until a couple of weeks ago, the process had been working as best as it could. I think people got into a rhythm, and then the White House stopped allowing CNN and Politico to go into these smaller spaces. |
| If you go into the Oval Office, that is not typically an open-press situation. That is usually the pool, the in-town pool, that gets to do that, because, despite what people have seen on “The West Wing,” the rooms in the White House are actually quite small. |
| I’m sorry that this sounds like a deposition, but I’m finding this helpful. In terms of access to the Oval, is it the same sort of process you just described, or is there any type of distinction? |
| There’s a little bit of a distinction, because of the space. It’s a small number of people. It’s usually the in-town pool. |
| | | “The best poolers understand that they are there on behalf of not just the American people, but the rest of the news organizations who can’t be in the room” |
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| The folks that go there are people who have been covering the White House for a long time. There’s print, there’s the photogs — the folks who take actual pictures — there’s the videographers that are part of the pool. There’s a radio pooler. |
| The reason that the pool system has worked for so long is because, one, everyone’s very professional and takes it very seriously, but also they understand that they’re not there for themselves. |
| The best poolers understand that they are there on behalf of not just the American people, but the rest of the news organizations who can’t be in the room. |
| They’re not supposed to focus on questions that only they would want. You try to figure out what the other kinds of questions are that you would ask the president that a large swath of folks want. |
| How long does it take to walk from the Oval Office to the briefing room? |
| It’s not very far. |
| Here’s the thing that is bugging me about the purported distinction between the public or press-accessible parts of the White House and the supposed private workspaces: The administration is deliberately using these spaces precisely because they think they can exercise more control, rather than the president just walking down the hallway and having to field questions from anyone. |
| We’ve gotten very accustomed to this with Trump, but this didn’t use to be normal — the constant sound and images of the president walking to the helicopter, the president quickly shuffling people in and out of the Oval. It seems like it’s all part of a strategy to create the appearance of press coverage but without the most probing form of it. |
| Part of the thing that has been interesting is watching the White House say that the president is the most transparent president because he takes a lot of questions from reporters. He takes a lot of questions from reporters — like, a lot of questions from reporters. |
| It was extremely rare that we would go to an event during the [Joe Biden administration] and spend another hour talking to him after. I don’t know if that ever happened. |
| That’s just part of it, because the president tends to have more things to do. This president doesn’t seem to have a schedule that is as structured as his predecessors’. |
| We would go into — let’s say there’s an event in one of the bigger rooms in the White House, or it’s the Cabinet Room. We’d do the event with the president. He would say whatever he would have to say, and then we’d get a few questions, and then eventually they’d move us out. |
| | | “The president does almost all his events in the Oval Office. It allows him to sit, and sometimes doze off, and everyone else operates around him.” |
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| [With President Trump,] we sometimes spend an hour in there afterward. What I think is interesting is that he doesn’t seem to move around as much as other presidents into the other rooms. |
| A lot of the events happen in the Oval Office, and there are, frankly, a lot of events that I think we all took for granted were separated from the White House. The vice president of the United States used to swear in the members of the Cabinet, and it was a ceremonial swearing-in. You wouldn’t have a picture of the [attorney general] and the president of the United States in the Oval Office. They would be in the ceremonial room in the [Eisenhower Executive Office Building], so there was a little bit of a separation, saying: the AG is not in the Oval Office hanging out. |
| Now it’s different. The president does almost all his events in the Oval Office. It allows him to sit, and sometimes doze off, and everyone else operates around him. |
| Sometimes you can go to the Oval Office multiple times during the week. That wasn’t always the case. |
| But this seems deliberate, even the staging — the ushering of people in and out of the Oval Office makes people beholden to him and his schedule. If he has to stand behind a lectern in the briefing room, it’s a more exposed and vulnerable position. |
| I think so, also because you’re in what he considers his base. It is the office that the president inhabits while they’re president. |
| I think, frankly, it also continues to allow them to block who they want out. Because if you had events that were in some of the larger rooms at the White House, now you’re in trickier territory as the administration when you’re trying to block folks from it, based on where we are right now with the AP’s case. |
| That’s exactly right, and that’s what I find so pernicious about this distinction. It didn’t use to be the case that anyone really cared about what the selection criteria were for who gets to go into the Oval Office from time to time, because the president hadn’t converted the Oval Office into an auxiliary briefing room. Now they’re deliberately moving events into these spaces where they can control the flow of people. |
| But there is a very specific value to the coverage in these smaller spaces: the Oval Office, the driveway, Air Force One. We get a very specific portrait of Trump through those events. |
| It’s not even really about the truth of what he’s saying. I don’t think he ever provides reliable, valuable insights into how the government works, but we’re clearly getting something from these events, and it’s clearly to our detriment as news consumers to not have smart, responsible, capable professionals in those spaces. |
| Can you explain why these spaces are so journalistically valuable for Americans? |
| Well, one, they don’t belong to the president. The thing that I think is most important is that this is not his house. It does not belong to Donald Trump. It did not belong to Joe Biden. It did not belong to George H.W. Bush. They all seemed to understand that it wasn’t their house. |
| They lease it for four years, with an option for renewal for the next four years. It is owned by the American people. |
| That’s one. At the end of the day, these spaces are not his to block, in my eyes. I don’t think the president should be choosing the people that cover them at all. |
| That is why the WHCA has been so important: because it is other reporters who are helping to navigate that space and make sure the right people — the people who are trained, the people who are there for the right reasons, who are there on behalf of the audience, wherever the audience might be, whether it be a New York Times audience or a Fox News audience. |
| It is important that that audience gets information from the president of the United States. With this president specifically, because he does so many events in those other spaces, it really does matter that folks are in the room. |
| | | “With this president, you have to kind of be in his face to get answers” |
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| This is a president and an administration that doesn’t really spend a lot of time doing some of the normal things. We haven’t had a press briefing in a very long time. They don’t go out of the way to give us information. |
| The president can have a call with a foreign leader, and we won’t get a readout. Those are things that used to be an important part of the process. |
| With this president, you have to kind of be in his face to get answers. You can’t fully do your job on behalf of the American people when you’re not in those spaces. |
| Say what you want about Donald Trump — and people have a lot to say — but he tends to let folks into his thinking. Think about the day when he first announced on Truth Social that he was blocking CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. People went in and asked the question, and he said, “Oh, you mean the ban on the free press?” |
| [Laughter] Thank you, I guess. Thank you for giving us the information. |
| And [then] they’re like, “Why?” He’s like, because I don’t like what they write, basically. |
| | | “It is important for reporters to be in the room because it’s also who else is there. Is it Sam Altman back there? Is Elon Musk in the corner?” |
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| Meanwhile, his team is trying to make it seem like a national security imperative. The president did a 90-minute interview with Time magazine and did not mention the national security imperative at all. |
| He is constantly telling people what he believes — whether it’s a lie, right? — what he believes in that moment. And that is a part of our job: to be witnesses to what the president is doing and saying. |
| It is important for reporters to be in the room because it’s also who else is there. Is it Sam Altman back there? Is Elon Musk in the corner? Who’s around the president tells folks a lot about what the president is focused on and who he’s focused on helping. |
| Being in those spaces actually does matter at the end of the day. I know our teams are going to work hard, they’re going to talk to their sources, but being at the White House, in those rooms, matters just as much. And the fact that we’re not is very clearly harmful to the work that folks are trying to do. |
| I think it’s depressing as a First Amendment issue, but also as an American who thinks it’s important that the president of the United States does not get to choose who covers him. |
| But this is the place where we are. And he’s not doing it for any other reason than he doesn’t like what they report. |
