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CNN, MS NOW, & Politico Denied White House Access After Trump Threat; Alaska Senate Race Could Be Key To Balance Of Power. Aired 12- 1p ET

Aired September 19, 2026 - 12:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:00:06]

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is CNN Breaking News.

KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Hi everyone, I'm Kasie Hunt. It is noon eastern here in Washington, where President Trump has followed through on his threat to ban at least three news organizations from the White House. Reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were all denied entry to the White House grounds when they showed up for work this morning.

Late Friday, the President announced online that he was, quote, "banning journalists" from those three media outlets over what he claimed was persistent negative coverage of him and his administration. Here's what CNN has said in a statement, quote, "Early today, CNN journalists were denied access to the White House grounds. CNN's mission to report on the U.S. government will continue regardless of any attempts to restrict physical access to the White House and other government buildings or any other attempts to impede our journalism.

We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do our reporting without hindrance or interference from the government, and this ban is an illegal assault on this fundamental right. We will not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account, and we will continue to report on the actions and processes of this administration without fear or favor. CNN stands fully behind our White House team."

I have a panel here to weigh in, but we are going to start with a member of our White House team, CNN Senior White House Reporter Betsy Klein. We're also going to talk to CNN Chief Media Analyst Brian Stelter.

But, Betsy, I first want you to take us through what your morning was like. You have, of course, as you noted earlier this morning, been covering the White House for years now. What happened today?

BETSY KLEIN, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE REPORTER: Yes, Kasie, I've been on the CNN White House team in some capacity since 2015 during the Obama administration. I was a producer. I'm now a reporter. And every day when I come here to the White House to do my job, I arrive at this intersection, 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest. From here, I go past an initial checkpoint. I show my identification,

my White House hard pass to a U.S. Secret Service agent. Then I proceed through, walk past the Eisenhower Executive Office building and into the Northwest Gate.

There, typically, you put down your backpack and your phones into a airport-like security conveyor belt, and you tap your hard pass onto a card reader and enter a four-digit PIN code. Today, I did all of that, except that there was a group of cameras waiting to greet me. There was also a military band rehearsing Battle Hymn of the Republic in preparation for an upcoming China state visit on the north grounds of the White House, a little triumphant entrance as I arrived.

And when I tapped my badge in, it lit up blue and red and green. It beeped a little bit. And the Secret Service agent took my badge. I asked him if there was any reason why. He said it had been disabled. I asked if he could provide some additional details. And he told me that he could not, and instead referred me to the White House Press Office to the Wranglers there for additional information.

I asked if I could have the pass back. He said no, but he did return the little clear case that had come in along with the lanyard. So then my colleague, Jonathan O'Beirne, photojournalist, and I went back out the gate that we had come from and proceeded to report on what had happened.

But this comes after President Trump said on Friday in that post to social media that he was going to be banning three outlets, CNN, Politico, and MS NOW, from the White House. And he did do so.

Our colleagues Akayla Gardner of MS NOW as well as Cheyenne Haslett of Politico, both also denied this morning. And we are seeking additional clarity from the White House on what this might mean in terms of CNN's role in the network pool rotation. We are expected to be pool on Monday traveling with the President to the United Nations General Assembly in New York as well as what it might mean for other upcoming travel for President Trump, what that will mean for our credentials.

But there are a lot of also questions about the legality here. First Amendment experts you've heard on CNN have questioned whether this is constitutional. Also questions about why this happened, what spurred it.

And I will just tell you that we are about 45 days away from the midterm elections. The President approval rating is at 36 percent. We are at war with Iran. Gas prices up to $4.47 per gallon. And yet this is what the President is choosing to focus on.

Kasie, we are going to continue to do our jobs here.

HUNT: As you do every day. Betsy, thank you very much for that.

So, Brian, look, when this broke yesterday, I was talking with Congressman Jake Auchincloss on the air, and he called for other outlets, including Fox News, to stand in solidarity. It's worth noting that the TV network pool, and we know how much the President cares about television cameras.

It's five networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, and Fox News. What are you hearing about potential moves in solidarity with these three organizations that have been banned?

[12:05:18]

BRIAN STELTER, CNN CHIEF MEDIA ANALYST: Yes. That becomes one of the key questions now. The leaders of the White House Correspondents Association are holding discussions about this. I expect we'll hear more from that group later today. That's the association that represents all the members of the press corps, big and small, from all the news outlets.

As for the network pool, it is those five networks you mentioned. And I'm told by two sources familiar with the matter that the five major TV networks are in dialogue about this issue and that there will be some show of solidarity. We will see what form that ultimately takes.

But here's why it's so interesting, just as a practical matter, right. Betsy, you mentioned the network pool rotation, those five TV networks that take turns working 24/7 to show the President, to have him on camera if he is taking questions or giving a speech or doing anything in public. That camera crew is at the ready 24/7.

And because it is CNN's turn to be in that rotation on Monday, there will be a moment, there will be a question at that moment about whether the White House continues to enforce this undemocratic, unconstitutional rule, or whether the White House will go ahead and allow CNN in as it has always done. So that will be a moment.

And then we will see if the other networks follow suit, whether the other networks end up what they say, quite frankly. Because we will be in a situation on Monday where if there is no pool camera, if there is no broadcaster that's with the President, then suddenly he's not going to be on camera in the same way he is used to be. And that is something, Kasie, you and I know the President deeply cares about.

The way I always think about this is Trump wants attention but not accountability. He wants the cameras and in some cases the photos, but he doesn't want the pesky questions and the people pointing out that he's lying. But in the United States you cannot have the attention without the accountability.

Trump's been trying to figure out ways to do that. It simply hasn't worked. The reality is that those MAGA media outlets that ask him fawning questions and make him feel really good with their, you know, with their softballs, they don't have the infrastructure, the money, the resources, the willingness to do the actual day-in, day-out work of traveling with the President, of covering him 24/7, of being there days and nights.

So that is the dynamic now. And that's why I'm really curious as a practical matter what happens on Monday.

And, Kasie, let me mention one more angle here. The other big X factor, the other big question now is about legal action. These three news outlets that have been banned are working through those steps. I expect we will hear more about legal action in the coming days and hours as well.

HUNT: All right. Brian Stelter, great points all, sir. Thank you very much for that report.

Our panel is here, CNN Media Analyst, Media Correspondent for Axios, Sara Fisher, White House Correspondent for Bloomberg News, Jeff Mason, and CNN Political Analyst and Historian Leah Wright Rigueur.

And, Jeff Mason, I want to talk to you again for viewers who are just joining us. You were a previous president of the White House Correspondents Association, longtime member of the press corps. And I actually want to read what Jacqui Heinrich, who is the current White House Correspondents Association President, she's, of course, of Fox News.

JEFF MASON, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, BLOOMBERG: Yes.

HUNT: She had to say in a statement last night. She said this, "The President said it plainly in the Oval Office, describing his own planned action as a ban on the free press. The Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference. That protection does not depend, does not depend on whether the President likes a news organization's coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask."

"This is about more," she said, "than that. It is more than the rights of journalists. It is about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the activities, policies, and decisions of whoever occupies the nation's highest office."

And she says the WHCA (ph) stands in defense of our colleagues at CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. I mean, this is the point, and I feel like we've been trying to talk about this all morning, right? This is about more than the rights of journalists. It is about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the presidency.

MASON: 100 percent. That's our job, and that's their right, is to get that news from us, because that is what was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution. And it is what the founders designed freedom of the press for, is to serve the public and to hold government accountable, and that's what we do.

The statement from Jacqui is spot on. I would also note, and we talked about this a little bit in the break --

HUNT: Yes.

MASON: -- none of us as journalists want to be the story. We --

HUNT: I started my career at the AP, right, where, like --

MASON: Yes. HUNT: -- where you're very far from, you know, you're way behind the camera, and the rule is you are not the story. You do not put yourself in the story.

MASON: Yes.

HUNT: I still find it uncomfortable to talk about, but here we are.

[12:10:01]

MASON: But here we are because the President has made it the story. I mean, I'd much rather be doing a political panel than talking about this. But this is -- this becomes a story because the President makes the media, as he does other institutions, sort of a fall guy or a scapegoat, and that's what he's done today.

SARA FISCHER, CNN MEDIA ANALYST: Can I just say something? I am a media reporter, so I'm media that covers the media for my job.

MASON: Yes.

FISCHER: And when I first started this job, we weren't talking as much around legal matters, regulatory matters that were threatening the press. My job was really to focus on the digital transformation of news. It was to talk about mergers and acquisitions. How do we protect local news?

So many of those critical stories at this point are falling behind because all we're doing is covering press tax, legal frameworks around how we're going to continue to press -- protect the press, how the actions here are impacting press freedoms around the world, journalists being jailed around the world.

And so you mentioned that we don't love to cover ourselves, and that's true, but it's becoming something that's bigger than just the media. It's becoming a story about democracy. It's becoming a story about cybersecurity, about the strength of our institutions in upholding the law. And this idea of a unitary executive that can, you know, sort of make unilateral moves, hope that its agencies and the legal framework around the United States would support it, and that is such a new, shocking idea.

The last thing I'll say on this, we mentioned so many of these cases are moving to the courts. President Trump has done a big job trying to get his preferred judges in a lot of these courts. And so the next battle that I'm watching is where are these cases getting filed? Are the judges who are overseeing them going to be sympathetic to the press?

Because not every case, we have a lot of legal precedent that does support the free press, but that's the next step. That's the next barrier, and President Trump is really trying to do his best to make sure that when it gets to a legal battle, he still has that control.

MASON: Just to be clear, I mean, it is a story, and we should be --

FISCHER: Yes, yes.

MASON: -- reporting on it, and I'm thankful for media reporters who cover the media. What I mean is as a White House reporter, we want to be reporting on the White House and not on ourselves.

HUNT: The White House is the story. The White House is the story, not the White House press corps, or that's how it should be.

MASON: 100 percent.

HUNT: Right.

MASON: And it's also not our job to be the opposition party. We are not.

HUNT: Right.

MASON: It is not our job to do a protest. It is our job to ask these hard questions in the Oval Office, on the plane, in the press room, as part of our role in a democracy.

HUNT: Right. And listen, reporters are fallible too, right?

MASON: Sure.

HUNT: We should absolutely be looking at ourselves and holding ourselves to the highest standards that we possibly can, but of course these questions are about our Constitution and the right that Americans have to know about their own government through a free press that has access.

Leah, I want to read Ari Fleischer, who was former press secretary to George W. Bush in the first two years of the Bush administration, including during 9/11. He's a Conservative. He wrote this on the Platform X, quote, "I agree with POTUS," shorthand for President of the United States, "that several media outlets covering the White House are biased and unfair," Fleischer says.

"Banning them from the White House is not the solution. Open the pool and the briefing room to conservatives. Challenge liberal reporters. Argue and defeat them." This, again, Ari Fleischer speaking. "Don't ban them, or one day they'll ban us." Which is kind of the point.

LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR, CNN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Which is -- so this is also why you see all of these people jumping in here, right? Because right now it feels in a particular way. It's President Trump who is at the top -- who's at the top of the ticket, who is in the White House, and who he gets to call the shots.

What happens when the bell changes, when it shifts, and there's a Democrat in power? And, in fact, one of the things that we saw amongst Conservative media, but also Conservative groups and Conservative outlets, was that under Democratic presidents, under President Obama, under President Biden, that there was bias against Conservatives. And that Conservatives were being excluded rather than included in this broad definition of who could be part of the press pool and who was part of the press corps.

And so I think that one of the reasons that we're seeing, in addition to this kind of defending democracy and defending the rights of the press, one of the reasons we are seeing kind of a really a widespread unanimous support behind the decision that this is a terrible idea, that the ban is unconstitutional and is wrong, is because all of these press outlets realize that at any point, it could be them.

FISCHER: And it was. Fox, during the Obama administration, they tried to exclude Fox from an interview, and the other networks stood up for Fox.

HUNT: Right. Yes, we said we won't have it.

FISCHER: Yes.

HUNT: Yes.

FISCHER: And that forced the White House to concede. So I think the power of the networks and backing CNN and MS NOW, and in particular I'm very curious to see the role that Fox is going to play in this, is going to be instrumental in seeing how this plays out moving forward.

[12:15:06]

HUNT: Yes. I want to play Jacqui Heinrich quoted the President in the tweet that she put out last night. And again, Jacqui being the actually -- she's on Fox News. She is the president, the current president of the White House Correspondents Association. But let's play a little bit of what the President said yesterday, because he was pressed by reporters.

And NBC's Kelly O'Donnell was the pool reporter in the room. She was also joined by other members of the press corps. And they pressed the President about why at that point he had only said he was going to do this. We didn't know yet he was actually going to bar the reporters, which they did this morning.

Let's watch a little bit of what the President said yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What does that mean in practice? Are you taking away their badges? Are you banning them from the pool? Are you banning them from the Oval Office? What does that mean?

DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I still don't know what --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What do you envision the ban (INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: How do you stand (INAUDIBLE) for media outlets?

TRUMP: Oh the ban on the free press, right? A very simple ban. I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. (END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: He said it out loud. A ban on the free press. He said it out loud right there for everyone to see. And now, of course, we are seeing the effects of what that means.

And, Jeff Mason, that was actually Seung Min Kim of the AP asking --

MASON: Yes.

HUNT: -- those questions in the Oval Office. But, I mean, what is it -- when you listen to him say that plain as day, it hits a little different.

MASON: It does. And I also think, you know, he says later in that clip when he's asked about the court challenges, he says, well, it's worth it just to raise this issue even if I lose the court challenge. So the President is showing there that he's aware that he's on legal -- shaky legal ground. But he doesn't care. I mean, he's just going to go through with it anyway because of his animosity towards the press.

HUNT: One other thing that I think is worth noting about this President, Jeff, and we saw it in some of the books that were written after he lost in 2020, is that he actually loves the press pool --

MASON: Yes.

HUNT: -- that covers him, right? Because when you are President of the United States, you snap your fingers and all of a sudden appear people who can tell everyone in the world, really, what you are saying, what you would like to say. And there was some reporting that he went looking for that pool after he had left office and was told that it was unavailable to him. What power does that give the other television networks as they decide how to handle this situation?

MASON: Well, I'll share an anecdote. When I was president of the Correspondents Association at the beginning of his first term, there were threats before he came into office about what he and his team were going to do with the press, including kicking us out of the press room, kicking us off of Air Force One. And we negotiated with them about that.

And I was very proud that we, for the first term, maintained our presence in both places. The reason I mention that is, I think his team learned very quickly after he became president that he really liked to be able to say, bring the pool in. So he got really used to the fact that reporters being so close, and we were talking about that physical closeness, proximity earlier, was really useful to him.

And he would hold, and still does, long press conferences or gaggles, as we call them, in small places. He'll bring the press into the Cabinet room --

HUNT: You see him in the door of the -- you know, when you see him standing in that door and it's kind of noisy, that's the back cab -- the press cab in Air Force One. MASON: That's exactly right.

HUNT: Yes.

MASON: So he likes that. He -- and that is what, I mean, we are there to cover and take time to ask him questions when he takes time to answer them. All of that is to say he got used to it. And then when he was out of office and wanted it back, we weren't there.

HUNT: All right, well, I guess it's -- there's a big open question. CNN is supposed to be pool on Monday for the President, if there's anyone that's going to be willing to fill in for us if we are banned, in fact, on Monday, as we were this morning.

All right, coming up next here, we're going to speak with a First Amendment attorney about the President's latest test at the Constitution.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KEVIN KILEY (I), CALIFORNIA: It's outrageous and it's jarring. You know, freedom of the press is not some partisan issue. This is a constitutional issue. It's a First Amendment issue. In many ways, it's the foundation of our democracy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[12:23:46]

HUNT: That was Independent Congressman Kevin Kiley of California reacting to the breaking news out of the White House this morning. Reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico have been turned away, a day after President Trump said he was banning the three outlets.

CNN's Betsy Klein says a Secret Service agent told her her press pass had been deactivated. All three newsrooms are signaling that they will take legal action.

Joining me now is First Amendment Attorney Jameel Jaffer, the former deputy legal director of the ACLU. Jameel, thank you so much for being here. Can you walk through --

JAMEEL JAFFER, FORMER DEPUTY LEGAL DIRECTOR, ACLU: Thank you.

HUNT: -- what you see here, this assault on the First Amendment?

JAFFER: Yes, I mean, I think this is part of a larger pattern in which President Trump is trying to intimidate the press and punish news organizations that he perceives to be critical of him or to be reporting in ways that are unfair to him. And, you know, to state the obvious, you know, lots of presidents don't like the press that they get.

You know, lots of presidents don't like what journalists report about them. Part of journalists' job is to report things that presidents don't want them to report.

[12:25:02]

What's really different here is not that the President doesn't like the reporting, but what he's doing in response to his dislike. And, you know, he has now expelled the Associated Press from the White House press pool because of its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He has instituted new rules at the Pentagon that restrict journalists' access to the Defense Department.

And now he is ejecting news organizations from the White House on the grounds that, in his view, their reporting is unfair to him. And, you know, this is not a complicated First Amendment question. This is, you know, if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the press gets to decide independently what's worth reporting and how to report it, and that the President doesn't get a veto over it, the President doesn't get to punish news organizations just because he doesn't like what they have to say.

So, you know, I don't think it's a complicated First Amendment question here. You're not going to find disagreement among First Amendment lawyers or media lawyers. Everybody's going to agree this is flagrantly unconstitutional.

HUNT: So can you talk a little bit about what the legal challenge to this might look like, how it might unfold, and its likelihood of success?

JAFFER: Yes. Yes, I mean, I think that there are two ways to look at it. You know, one is it's punishment of news organizations whose coverage the President doesn't like. And, you know, in that sense, it's like a -- it would be a retaliation lawsuit.

And, you know, it's a pretty easy retaliation lawsuit because the President himself has made clear why he has imposed this punishment on these news organizations. He was asked about it at a briefing yesterday and said quite candidly that I don't like their coverage and I'm therefore going to ban them from the White House.

So there's not a lot of factual dispute here. So we would go directly to the legal question which is, can the President retaliate against news organizations for their coverage? And I think the answer to that is, you know, is very clear. So that's one way of looking at the case.

Another way of looking at the case is that it's the President expelling news organizations from a public forum. A public forum is a phrase that has a special meaning under First Amendment doctrine. It basically means a space that the government has opened up to the public or the press for expression.

And, you know, the sort of prototypical public forum is a city hall or a school board meeting. But the courts have applied that doctrine, that public forum doctrine to all sorts of spaces, including press briefing areas and, in fact, the President's social media account as well. My organization, the Knight Institute, sued over the President's exclusion of critics from his social media accounts several years ago if he won that case. So I think that, you know, you could also see this case as a case about the President's authority to expel news organizations from a public forum, the White House press pool, on the basis of their viewpoints.

And if you look at the case that way, it's just as easy. You come to the same result. In either case, the President lacks the authority to exclude news organizations simply because he doesn't like what they have to say.

HUNT: Yes. So the President said that anyone can cover the White House. They just can't be allowed into the people's house. And you may have just explained it, but can you explain how that's wrong?

JAFFER: Yes, I mean, I think it does have to do with this public forum doctrine. It has to do with, you know, the difference between an exclusive interview and a space in which the President has, you know, sort of opened up the space to journalists generally.

And, you know, nobody disputes that the President has the authority to give an exclusive to whichever news organization he wants to. If he wants to sit down with CNN or Fox News or whoever it is and give them an exclusive, that's fine. But if he opens up a space to journalists generally, as he has with, you know, through the White House press pool and, you know, in various spaces in the White House, if he's opened those spaces to journalists at large, he can't then exclude journalists simply because he doesn't like what those journalists have to say.

And it's the same principle that applies in a school board meeting, where the school board, you know, if it has an open meeting that's open to the public, it can't then exclude a particular person because that person is criticizing the school board. It's a, you know, it's a simple First Amendment principle that's sort of at the heart of many important First Amendment cases going back almost 100 years.

HUNT: All right. Jameel Jaffer, thank you so much for bringing your expertise to us this morning. I really appreciate it.

JAFFER: Thank you.

HUNT: All right, coming up next here, presidential historian and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library, Tim Naftali is here with us live to talk about the President's attack on the First Amendment.

[12:30:16]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is there any way to, uh, to get some kind of a handle on this situation? Should the media be investigated? Should it be controlled?

RICHARD NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: No, I may disagree, for example, with what some president does with his power, but I don't want to abolish the presidency or I don't want to control it. The same is true of the press. I believe in a free press.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[12:34:59]

HUNT: President Nixon could say it, I believe in a free press. As President Trump blocks CNN and other outlets from the White House, it is worth noting that Donald Trump is far from the only American president who has had an adversarial relationship with the press. Nixon famously antagonized the media, tried to hamstring it, even went so far as to wiretap some journalists.

And yet, as you heard there, even Richard Nixon could at least publicly acknowledge the basic value of a free press. Here's another example. Another president, John F. Kennedy, who laid out the stakes this way.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive. That is why our press was protected by the First Amendment, the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution, not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply give the public what it wants, but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate, and sometimes even anger public opinion.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUNT: Sometimes even anger public opinion, the only business, only business protected by the Constitution, the free press.

Joining me now, CNN presidential historian, Tim Naftali. He's the former director of the Nixon Presidential Library. Tim, thank you very much for coming back here with us as we continue to reflect on this. President Trump, of course, saying that anyone can cover the White House, they just can't be in the people's house. We've heard legal experts say that's simply not the case. What does it all mean?

TIM NAFTALI, CNN PRESIDENTIAL HISTORIAN: Well, I think for those of us who aren't lawyers, on the face of it, how could it be permissible that the president can decide who covers his administration in the people's house? In his press conference yesterday, the President made a very interesting verbal slip.

He started by saying, my house, and then he corrected himself, but I really believe that he believes that the White House is his house. I think it's important to put into context the adversarial relationship that many presidents have had with the press, and then to ask ourselves, how is it different now?

You just heard from John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy, generally speaking, had an excellent relationship with the press, but John F. Kennedy himself and his attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, wiretapped members of the press. Robert F. Kennedy, at the president's request, used the FBI to intimidate business reporters during a struggle with the steel industry in 1962.

Robert F. Kennedy put pressure on some journalists who were reporting on possible girlfriends or mistresses of the president in 1963. So we have to keep in mind that presidents acting badly with regard to the press is nothing new in our history. What's new today is a president acting on a threat to ban media outlets that he says are producing fake news. That's the difference. That's the red line that we crossed.

And sure, "MSNBC" -- "MS NOW," CNN, "Politico" will continue to report, but the fact that the president thinks he has the power to deny them access to a public building, which is a public forum of discussion and information and news, that makes this president different from his predecessors. They disliked the press oftentimes. Richard Nixon required that his press secretary actually hate the press to be press secretary, but they didn't ban it.

HUNT: Just such a fascinating example, Tim, and I'm wondering, from the depths of knowledge that you possess, I mean, what other times in history would you point to where presidents have had an antagonistic relationship with a reporter or groups of reporters and then ultimately still maintained the standard that meets our First Amendment? I mean, if, you know, you think back, there are many examples.

NAFTALI: Yes, there are. And when we think about this, we have to keep in mind the tensions of wartime, too. And I'm not saying now, I think the president, in focusing on both the Kennedy Center and the ballroom, is not showing himself to be that focused on the undeclared war with Iran. But if we look at World War II and the Cold War, some of the tension between White Houses and a free press have been over leaks, national security leaks.

[12:40:19]

And so White Houses have investigated, and this was also true after 9/11, when the White House believes that national security has been in some way compromised by a leak to a free press. The most famous example, of course, is in the Nixon period, when there was the issue of the Pentagon Papers, and whether these materials that had been leaked to the "New York Times" should have led to an injunction against "The Times" and other newspapers. So that's always been a source of tension. It's not the same, however, as banning the press.

HUNT: Right. Well, and I'm thinking back to, like, this is bipartisan frustration, right? It's not just Republicans who've had an adversarial relationship with the free press over the years. I mean, you talked about Kennedy, who's a Democrat. Some of the -- one of the most prominent examples of what you just laid out actually happened under the Obama administration, where they went after, you know, reporters' sources on national security. I mean, they were frustrated by that, too. And yet they did not take this step.

NAFTALI: Right. And look, I mean, Franklin Roosevelt investigated the "Chicago Tribune" in 1942 because of an apparent leak. He also apparently put pressure on sources of paper, of supply of paper, to make it harder for the "Chicago Tribune" to get paper. He disliked the newspaper. He disliked his coverage.

So we have seen individual instances where presidents have acted badly, because these are instances of bad presidential action. They all represent threats to our First Amendment. But it's the banning.

HUNT: Yes.

NAFTALI: And it's also the fact that this president has overtly, what I've described, or we've discussed, are secret efforts. It doesn't make them better that they're secret. But this president seems to revel in saying that he alone can decide what Americans should hear. And then when people say things Americans he doesn't believe should hear, he wants to ban those people from continuing to make those statements. That's new.

HUNT: Yes. All right. Tim Naftali, thank you, as always, for your perspective, sir. I really appreciate it.

NAFTALI: Thank you, Kasie.

HUNT: All right. Coming up next right here, CNN's John King looks at one of the coldest places in the U.S. that suddenly has one of the country's hottest Senate races.

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[12:47:27]

HUNT: All right, welcome back. In Alaska, there's a key midterm race that could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. A two- term Republican senator seeking a third term against a Democrat who used to represent the state in the U.S. House.

CNN's John King heads north and west in his All Over the Map series to see whether this could be the final frontier for Senator Dan Sullivan.

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JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The state fair has a spectacular snowy backdrop, rides, games, and yes, a little politics if you wish. Alaska Republicans put the president front and center as they try to promote Senator Dan Sullivan and other GOP candidates.

The Democrats also feature Trump, hoping anger at the president helps their ticket. Daily celebrations of Native Alaskans and traditions many in the lower 48 might not understand. They're about 15 percent of the population now, many living in the most remote corners of this giant state.

Lisa Lynch lives in the Anchorage suburbs now. But her mother is from Nome.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: These are salmon strips.

KING (voice-over): And much of their family still there.

LISA LYNCH, ALASKA VOTER: It is crazy to think that you could go to a grocery store here in America and there's no fresh meat, there is no fresh fruit, there's no fresh vegetables, and it gets a whole bad in some of the villages.

KING (voice-over): A visitor gets VIP Inupiaq treatment. The curved ulu used to chop slices of dried salmon and muktuk, whale blubber. Yes, some policy disagreements with Senator Sullivan, but Lynch says her vote for Peltola is mostly because of her rural Alaska roots.

LYNCH: He has lived here for a long time, but it's not quite the same because he never had to rely on the fish runs to feed his family. He never had to worry about if they could have a moose in their freezer or go caribou hunting.

KING (voice-over): Everywhere you go, reminders of the big choice. And don't make the mistake of thinking these warnings are just for show.

Rick Brown moved to Alaska three decades ago, the day he retired from the fire department back home in Kentucky.

RICK BROWN, ALASKA VOTER: I think Michael just wrote logistics.

KING (voice-over): Apparently so. Started his own adventure company 20 years ago, fishing, hiking, kayaking, panning for gold. He just turned 75.

KING: Happy birthday.

BROWN: So anyway, you know, if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it.

KING (voice-over): Business this summer was OK. He expected better.

[12:50:01]

BROWN: I think the war had a little bit to do with it, and people were unsure of what was going to happen. We get a lot of campers that come up, they drive up, and I see that changing as the years go on, as the price of fuel gets up.

KING (voice-over): Brown likes Senator Sullivan and says he helped the company get access to federal land for some of its tours. For Sullivan twice before, leaning Sullivan this time, but some hesitation because of campaign support the senator receives from larger fishing operations.

BROWN: Our sewers used to be a little village with a fishing problem, you know. Now it's tourism, a tourism town, but it's a -- but I still have a lot of friends that are commercial fishermen, and I want to see what's going to happen to support some of the issues they got.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

HUNT: All right, that was John King for us in Alaska. We'll be right back.

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[12:55:37]

HUNT: Recapping the hour's top story. For those of you just joining us, journalists from CNN, "MS NOW," and "Politico" have been denied entry to the White House this morning after a threat by the president to ban the news organizations. CNN's Fredricka Whitfield is going to pick up our reporting at the top of the hour.

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