HuffPost Back In White House Press Pool After Being Booted

After booting a HuffPost reporter out of the pool of journalists who follow the president last month, the White House reversed course on Friday.

HuffPost White House reporter S.V. Date reported on President Donald Trump’s public activities at the White House, which included a Friday afternoon swearing-in ceremony for Alina Habba as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey, and Trump’s departure for his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

The White House press pool is responsible for tracking the president throughout the day and sending updates to the broader group of reporters who cover the president.

Last month, the White House kicked out reporters from HuffPost, Reuters and The Associated Press from the pool, escalating a fight that began after Trump administration officials insisted The Associated Press comply with Trump’s decision to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

“HuffPost condemns this egregious violation of the First Amendment. Americans deserve fair and honest reporting on their president,” HuffPost editor-in-chief Whitney Snyder said at the time. “The White House must stop this cowardly behavior and restore HuffPost’s place in the press pool immediately.”

Associated Press journalists testified in court on Friday as part of the storied news organization’s effort to overturn a White House ban on being able to cover events on its grounds. The outlet has denounced the ban as a fundamental attack on freedom of speech.

“For anyone who thinks the Associated Press’s lawsuit against President Trump’s White House is about the name of a body of water, think bigger,” AP executive editor Julie Pace wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. “It’s really about whether the government can control what you say.”