The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  “This is a test for all of us,” I told Anderson. “I do think they’re trying to shut us down.”

  As I made my way home, I tried to make sense of the day’s events. It seemed to me that the people inside the White House had all lost their minds. They were so upset about the midterms, it appeared, that they had become unmoored from rationale thought. They were flailing, like a drowning swimmer—and frantically reaching around for somebody else to drag down to the bottom.

  All over social media, folks were speculating that the microphone grab by the intern had been a setup. The thinking behind this theory was that Trump had been so damaged by the midterm results that he needed to change the narrative by going after his favorite foil, the news media. I think that’s probably giving the people in Trumpworld too much credit. My sense then, and it’s still my belief, is that this was just Trump and the White House coming unglued. Remember, these are the same folks who said they were too dumb to collude with the Russians. Sure, attacking CNN would help Trump change the narrative. But why, then, had he then gone on to describe questions from Yamiche Alcindor as “racist.” No, this was Trump being Trump. He had been backed into a corner, and he was fighting back. But he was losing. And at this White House, they don’t lose graciously.

  Sanders would go on to prove that point with her next course of action. As anybody who watched the video could plainly see, I did not place my hands on anybody. But being a bad liar, Sanders doubled down and posted another tweet. Sarah, it seemed, was well aware she was being hammered on Twitter for her ridiculous first attempt at smearing me. This time, she stepped back from the “placing his hands” language and responded by taking White House gaslighting to new Orwellian heights.

  @PressSec

  We stand by our decision to revoke this individual’s hard pass. We will not tolerate the inappropriate behavior clearly documented in this video.

  Bizarrely attached to the tweet was a doctored clip of my encounter with the intern—a brief, sped-up version of the video that magnified and exaggerated the momentary, incidental contact the intern made with me as she came into my space and grabbed the microphone. One other unmistakable change to the video tweeted by Sanders was it was now silent—you could no longer hear me saying, “Pardon me, ma’am,” an omission immediately detected by others as well. The White House had presented the public with more than alternative facts—this was an alternative reality, tweeted out to the entire world.

  According to news reports at the time, the “karate chop” motion I was accused of making was apparently the creation of an individual associated with the fringe website Infowars. This marked another mind-boggling action taken by the White House. As many observers noted at the time, it was astounding and surreal that the White House, or the U.S. government, would stoop to using a doctored video from a discredited website to smear a journalist. It was something an authoritarian government would do. It was something China or Russia would do.

  It was also, it occurred to me, the height of hypocrisy. This was, after all, the same president who had once bragged that it was okay to grab a woman by her genitals. It was the same president who had been accused of sexual assault by multiple women. It was the same president who had supported other alleged abusers, Roy Moore in Alabama and Rob Porter on his own White House staff. Who were these people to accuse me of anything? Also, it’s difficult to understand how I can be accused of assault when I was just trying to hold on to a microphone.

  One thing, at least, was clear: the White House was finally playing for keeps. The endgame was obvious. This wasn’t about changing the narrative. The Trump people wanted me out and were willing to smear me to make that happen. I knew I had not done anything wrong. I looked at the video a few more times just to be sure. Had I “karate chopped” the intern’s arm, as the doctored video showed? No, I had not. That was obvious.

  Then something else strange happened.

  An outpouring of support came in to me privately. Former coworkers whom I had not seen in twenty years were emailing me to express their outrage over what was clearly a smear aimed at silencing me. Some of these old colleagues were posting their sentiments on Facebook. It was a solid show of support that gave me the determination to keep fighting.

  Behind the scenes at CNN, we were weighing our options. Obviously, the White House had overreacted. But something more profound had occurred: they had violated my rights as a journalist. For starters, Sanders and her boss, Bill Shine, had not even notified me of their decision. Second, they had offered a ridiculous rationale for swiping my hard pass. If they had had a good case, they wouldn’t have needed an altered video to prove their point. Also, Trump, as his people know all too well, encourages a rough-and-tumble environment at his press conferences. He lives for it. When I look back at the video of the press conference or read the transcript, I see the White House as the clear aggressor. Trump began to interrupt me as I asked my question. He is the one who launched into the insults, calling CNN the “enemy of the people” and so on.

  For me, the stakes felt greater than just my job or the prospect of never covering the White House again. This was only a couple of short weeks after a Trump supporter sent pipe bombs to CNN and others, after personally threatening me on social media. I would be lying if I didn’t admit to feeling fearful at the time. To some Americans, I had become the enemy of the people. The death threats were once again polluting my social media accounts. In addition to that, there were Trump supporters who were parroting the White House attacks online, accusing me of assault and worse. Worried about the mental state of the many people posting such comments, I thought for the first time that it was possible somebody would actually try to kill me for doing my job. During the next two weeks, I was constantly looking over my shoulder. I had gotten death threats before and shaken them off, but this was too many.

  * * *

  IN THE MEANTIME, THERE WERE MORE IMMEDIATE CONCERNS, practical ones. I needed to get my hard pass back. CNN did ask the White House to reconsider, but it didn’t want to back down. (Shocker.)

  Fortunately, the schedule for the rest of that week gave us a little time to consider our options. I was off to Paris to cover Trump’s trip to France to mark Armistice Day, the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. No hard pass was necessary for the beginning of the trip, as I was able to go live from the CNN bureau in Paris, with its amazing views of the Eiffel Tower. But the weekend was about to get trickier, as Trump was scheduled to hold some events that would require a White House hard pass. The first event came on Sunday morning, when Trump joined the leaders from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia (yes, Putin) to mark the end of World War I. Fortunately, the French were organizing the event. My producer Matt Hoye and I had discussed the situation the night before. The White House, we reasoned, would not relent and cough up my hard pass, so we decided to use a back door. I called a contact with the French government, who produced a credential. Vive la France! The official, who shall remain anonymous, said the French government would be happy to have me on hand.

  So, that Sunday morning, Matt and I made our way down to the Arc de Triomphe, where Trump was attending his first Armistice event. The scene in Paris that Sunday was quite a memorable one, as French president Emmanuel Macron ripped Trump for his nationalist, unilateral view of the world.

  “Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” Macron said in the pouring rain at the Arc de Triomphe. Nationalism, he added was a “betrayal of patriotism.” It was clearly a rebuke from Macron. Trump had just described himself as a “nationalist,” right before the midterms.

  Warning of “old demons reawakening,” Macron implicitly linked Trump’s brand of politics and the wave of nationalism spreading across much of Europe to the rise of fascism, the same scourge that had threatened to wipe out mankind in the twentieth century.

  “History sometimes threatens to repeat its tragic patterns, and undermines the legacy of peace we thought we had sealed with the blood of our
ancestors,” Macron continued. It was a brutal, pointed takedown of Trump.

  The French official who had helped me with my press pass told me Macron’s speech was aimed not just at Trump, but at the whole world. Was the world listening? I wondered. Macron, who had behaved like something of a “bro” with Trump in their previous encounters, complete with macho handshakes, had rebuked the U.S. president by taking a Kennedyesque stand for freedom. In what must have been a surreal moment for a French leader, standing on the same streets of Paris that had been liberated from the Nazis, Macron made the case for the kind of multilateral, global leadership that had kept much of the world at peace for more than half a century. I had personally never witnessed an American president taken to the woodshed by a fellow foreign leader in that fashion. There was Macron, defending what used to be U.S. principles. An insult to some Americans, I’m sure, but Macron, it seemed to me, was doing it out of a love for America and all her sacrifices to save the French people.

  I was there to witness it all and report it out live for CNN. In a bit of logistical wizardry, my producer Matt was able to get me on the air simply using his iPhone. We Skyped into the control room and were on the air to report this historic moment, all without a White House press pass.

  Later that day, we faced a bigger challenge. Trump, who had been hammered with criticism for skipping a trip to a cemetery one day earlier because of the rain, was heading out to another cemetery site. We raced out of the city to cover the event, about ten miles outside Paris. It was pouring again. As we arrived on the scene, a Secret Service official questioned whether we had the proper credentials to attend the event. We flashed our French pass, and he didn’t turn us away. (Maybe he hadn’t gotten the memo.) We continued to show off our gift from the French government and made our way to the cemetery for Trump’s only speech of the trip. As any reporter who’s covered presidential events will tell you, making your way to the site where the U.S. president will be is no easy task. And this case was no different: the security perimeter was a meandering trek, one mile around the cemetery.

  Alas, as we reached the Secret Service checkpoint to enter the cemetery, it was made clear to us that we weren’t getting inside. A supervisor calmly but coldly informed us that we were not credentialed to enter the event.

  “Take it up with the press office,” he said. And that was it.

  For the first time in my five years covering the White House, I had been denied access to enter a presidential event. It’s odd. At that moment, I wasn’t really disappointed or frustrated. It was more a feeling of bewilderment, and then clarity. They were serious about this ban, which meant it was time for me to be just as serious. I was determined to make sure this unconstitutional nonsense did not stand.

  In a sense, the White House had just done us a favor. As it turned out, discussions were already under way inside CNN to challenge the revocation of my hard pass in court. The White House Press Office had just demonstrated the real-world impact of its ban on my reporting. Without any advance notification of the revocation and without any kind of due process for taking that sort of extreme action, the White House had done something no president had dared attempt in decades. President Trump had likely just violated the civil rights of an American journalist. And we were all about to find out exactly what the United States of America, with its enduring system of checks and balances, was going to do about it.

  14

  Revocation and Redemption

  After I had been turned away by the Secret Service at that cemetery in France, I wondered how long we could conceivably fight this out. The odds for a clean victory, I thought, were probably remote.

  My flight home was delayed four hours, so I sat at Paris–Charles de Gaulle airport checking my phone for updates on what was about to take place next in the dustup over my press pass. At that point, CNN had made the decision to file a lawsuit against the White House, seeking the return of my credentials. Our attorneys at CNN, along with a formidable outside legal team, had been discussing options for how to proceed. The instructions to everybody were simple: no talking about what was about to happen (and certainly no tweeting—that was for me).

  So much for best-laid plans. Word got out anyway.

  Former White House correspondent Sam Donaldson, who had been a thorn in the side of the Reagan administration, had offered his support in our case. Donaldson and I had met earlier in 2018, at the CNN management retreat. Sharp and funny as ever, Sam had come to offer all of us a morale boost, letting us know that our coverage of the White House was fully in keeping with the tradition of aggressive reporting on the presidency.

  “People who stick their head above the crowd get hit by rotten fruit,” Donaldson told us.

  As I was wrapping up my trip to Paris, Donaldson was being interviewed on the CNN program Reliable Sources, which covers the media, and he inadvertently disclosed to anchor Brian Stelter that he was offering his assistance in our case. This was a huge boost for our cause, as Donaldson, who had made a name for himself for his reporting on Ronald Reagan, could very simply point to his own record as evidence that tough questions, assertively posed to world leaders, are not only part of an accepted practice at the White House, but an essential component of how news outlets cover any presidency.

  “I hope I’m not mistaken, but it’s my understanding that CNN and Acosta have sued, that there will be a court hearing on Tuesday on this very matter we’ve been discussing,” Donaldson told Stelter.

  That, of course, surprised Stelter, who had not seen this reported anywhere, at least not yet.

  “I’ve been told that because I’ve been asked to give an affidavit, which I’ve prepared, to be submitted to the court,” Donaldson added.

  Sam had the scoop. We hadn’t sued just yet, but we were about to take the plunge. Donaldson had accidentally let the cat out of the bag. I didn’t mind one bit. Indeed, I thought it fitting that Sam Donaldson had broken the news. It was gratifying to have a legend like Sam on our side. He, too, had been called a “grandstander” and a “showboat” in his time, during his days covering Reagan. You can still find clips of Sam’s greatest hits on YouTube. He would shout questions at Reagan, who would cup his hand around an ear, pretending he couldn’t hear what was being asked. Sam knew that folks were going to attack us if we were tough on Trump; it was expected. But it shouldn’t stop us. Sam and I had kept in contact since that CNN management retreat. He had emailed me after the revocation of my hard pass and urged me to “keep charging.”

  When I landed back in Washington, I found an email that required my immediate attention. A conference call was scheduled to take place within the hour about the lawsuit. As I was waiting in line at customs, I listened as our attorneys—CNN’s lead lawyer, David Vigilante, and our lead outside counsel, Ted Boutrous—explained our case. Putting aside our unanimous feeling that our First Amendment rights had been violated, the attorneys were particularly interested in a previous court decision that pointed to a more obscure but very important aspect of the case that hadn’t really occurred to most folks. Simply put, by yanking my hard pass without any prior explanation, the White House had violated my right to due process. In other words, we also had a Fifth Amendment argument on our hands.

  Our attorneys were referring to the 1977 case of Sherrill v. Knight. In that case, reporter Robert Sherrill applied for credentials but was denied by LBJ’s White House. You want to talk decorum? Sherrill had gotten himself into hot water by punching an aide to a Florida gubernatorial candidate. That incident, it seemed, was enough for the Secret Service to reject his application for a press pass when he became a White House correspondent for The Nation. Where the Johnson White House, along with the Secret Service, made a mistake was in refusing to notify Sherrill of the rationale behind the decision, prompting the lawsuit against the government. A federal judge in the case ruled that the Secret Service and the White House had violated Sherrill’s due process rights. The First Amendment, the court decided, protected Sherrill’s rights
as a journalist to enter the grounds of the White House to do his job. A DC appeals court ruling found that “the protection afforded newsgathering under the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press requires that this access not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.” The same thing, our lawyers were prepared to argue, had happened in my case.

  As you might expect, I didn’t sleep much that night. Before I went to bed, the head of CNN public relations, Allison Gollust, informed me that media reporters were going to break the news on the filing of our lawsuit in the morning. CNN was taking Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, to court. It was the case of CNN v. Donald J. Trump. Also named in the lawsuit were Sarah Sanders and Bill Shine, Trump’s recently hired communications director. As a matter of procedure, we also sued an unnamed Secret Service agent and the director of the Secret Service, as that agency had technically pulled my hard pass on behalf of the White House. I hated that part, as I had always had very good relations with the Secret Service. I knew full well that the officer who confiscated my press pass was just doing his job.

  In addition, the lawsuit included a declaration from me. Admittedly, it’s a bit odd to read this sort of thing in a court document, but this is how the process works. In the declaration, I talk about how the revocation of my press pass would decimate my career, making it impossible for me to work as a White House correspondent for any other news outlet. Would this engender much sympathy? Probably not. But I had to put into writing exactly how the government’s decision to pull my pass would basically shut me down as a journalist covering the White House. It was fair to say at the time that if I were banned from entering the White House grounds, then other news outlets would be unable to hire me as a White House correspondent.