The White House barred the Wall Street Journal from traveling with President Trump on his upcoming trip to Scotland after the newspaper published a "fake" story tying President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
“Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board" Air Force One, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
"Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”
The White House press pool has a limited number of slots for reporters covering the president's daily business.
An appeals court on Tuesday declined to overturn a prior ruling that allowed the White House to remove the left-leaning Associated Press from the pool's rotation. The White House cracked down after the AP refused to adopt Trump's renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, which he calls the Gulf of America.
Trump's critics have condemned his shakeup of the press pool as an attack on free speech, but the White House says they are ending the "special" treatment traditionally given to big news organizations.
"As the appeals court confirmed, the Wall Street Journal or any other news outlet are not guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” Leavitt said.
The Wall Street Journal drew Trump's ire after publishing an article about a "bawdy" letter that Trump supposedly sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday.
The letter allegedly contained an imagined conversation between the two men written inside a drawing of a naked woman.
Trump and many of his supporters have said the letter sounds nothing like Trump, and Trump promptly sued the Wall Street Journal and its billionaire owner, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, for $20 billion.
“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
“These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter! DJT.”
Trump's clash with the Wall Street Journal comes as the White House has been consumed by backlash over its handling of the Epstein files. Trump has urged his supporters to move on, calling the controversy a "hoax" being pushed by Democrats.
Another newspaper that has been critical of Trump, the New York Times, defended the Wall Street Journal and condemned the White House's action as retaliatory.
“The White House’s refusal to allow one of the nation’s leading news organizations to cover the highest office in the country is an attack on core constitutional principles underpinning free speech and a free press,” a New York Times spokesperson said.
