African Reporter Often Targeted By Jean-Pierre Sues Over Revoked Press Pass
Simon Ateba, the White House correspondent for Today News Africa, has filed a lawsuit against White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the United States Secret Service in response to their decision to revoke his press pass.
On Thursday, Ateba filed a complaint asserting that his press pass had been “wrongfully revoked” and that the White House had violated the First and Fifth Amendments.
The African journalist’s “hard pass” was revoked by the White House in May, which means that he has been banned from attending official White House press briefings since his pass expired on July 31. This came after a shocking decision from the Biden administration, which for the first time in U.S. history laid out a process by which journalists could lose their credentials — as they revoked all hard passes in May and issued a new set of strict requirements under the guise of “protecting security and ensuring decorum.”
Ateba is now accusing the White House of issuing these new requirements specifically to exclude him from press briefings — as he has a history of asking Jean-Pierre tough questions and verbally sparring with her when she refused to answer them.
“Defendants violated Mr. Ateba’s First Amendment rights by changing the criteria for hard pass credentials to intentionally prevent Mr. Ateba from obtaining hard pass access,” the complaint states.
“Defendants did so by adopting credentialing criteria specifically designed to exclude Mr. Ateba from eligibility. Such discrimination amounts to a content-based regulation and viewpoint discrimination against Mr. Ateba in violation of the First Amendment,” the complaint continues.
The Liberty Center, a law group representing Ateba, has argued that the new restrictions imposed by the Biden administration are part of the “elitist” Washington, D.C., journalists’ attempts at gatekeeping and excluding those who are critical of the Biden administration.
“It is clear that the White House changed its credentialing requirements specifically to exclude Simon, in direct violation of the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press,” the law group wrote in a statement.
Included in the new requirements is a rule that each reporter must have press credentials from either the Supreme Court or one of the four Congressional Press Galleries.
“The Supreme Court only issues press credentials to reporters who cover the Supreme Court full time. In other words, no White House reporter could ever qualify for these credentials, making this requirement entirely meaningless,” the Liberty Center explained in their statement.
“Contrary to what the name implies, the Congressional Press Galleries aren’t government-run, objective credentialing institutions. They’re made up entirely of DC insider journalists from elitist media outlets. And the one criterion they use for issuing credentials to other journalists is that the applying journalist be ‘reputable,’” they continued. “The definition of ‘reputable’ is left entirely up to this group of reporters who are knee deep in the Swamp and openly hostile to reporters like Simon who don’t adhere to their DC elitest standards.”
Ateba has faced discrimination from the White House long before his press pass was revoked, as Jean-Pierre has refused to call on him during press briefings for several months now — forcing him to “speak up during the briefings to make his voice impossible to ignore,” according to the Liberty Center. Even when the press secretary has called on Ateba in the past, she would scold him, shout at him or even storm out of the room in response to his questions.
