White House defies judge's order to restore press access, calls access a privilege not a right.

…(cont) The next afternoon, Wednesday, September 23, the three outlets got their hearing. The judge, Timothy Kelly, is a Trump appointee. He heard the privilege argument, and he did not buy it. By early Thursday morning, September 24, he had ordered the administration to "immediately return, reinstate, and restore" the outlets' press passes.

The administration's immediate response to being told to restore access immediately was to not restore access. Thursday morning, reporters from the three outlets were turned away at the White House complex, the judge's order notwithstanding. It took until 1:30 that afternoon for the press office to file its own paper attesting that access had, in fact, now been restored — roughly five hours after the deadline the judge had already set for "immediately."

That order was supposed to hold through October 8. On October 1, a week before it expired, the White House blocked CNN again, this time from a press pool traveling to Texas and Oklahoma, while the order was still, on paper, in force.

Which brings us to this morning. The lawsuit is back in Judge Kelly's courtroom at 11 a.m., the same courtroom where he already found, once, that the administration would not do what he told it to do the first time he told it to do it. The question in front of him today is not really about press passes. It is about whether an order from a federal judge is a request the executive branch may decline when it is inconvenient on a given Thursday, and whether "privilege, not a right" is a legal theory, or just a description of how the government has been behaving regardless of what the paper says.