White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has clashed with reporters’ shouted questions. “You’re being incredibly rude. Simon, stop,” Jean-Pierre one reporter last month.
Now, Joe Biden’s White House is clamping down on another veteran conservative reporter — Fed Lucas of The Daily Signal.
The White House has previously given some reporters “hard passes,” credentials enabling them to go in and out daily.
However, the Biden administration is allowing all the hard passes to expire on July 31… and it’s making reporters jump through hoops in order to reapply, according to an email obtained by The Daily Signal.
To receive a hard pass, a reporter must now prove full-time employment at a news outlet, a physical address near D.C., a work-related visit to the White House within the last six months, an assignment to cover the White House, and more.
For a hard pass, reporters even need to provide press credentials to cover the Senate, the House, or the Supreme Court… even though the Supreme Court only accredited about 25 reporters for the past term.
Fred Lucas — The Daily Signal‘s White House correspondent — looks likely to lose his hard pass after covering the White House since 2007.
“The Daily Signal, a media outlet founded by The Heritage Foundation in 2014, doesn’t have press credentials to cover Congress or the Supreme Court, although Lucas recently applied for both,” the outlet wrote. “It’s unclear when he’ll receive a response and unlikely he’ll be approved, if history is a guide.”
The outlet said Lucas has held a hard pass since 2009.
Biden supporters have encouraged journalists to apply for a day pass.
Plus, the Biden administration itself has defended the new rules as a measure to retire the number of unused hard-passes, a potential risk to security. The White House claims to have gone more than 90 days without seeing some portion of hard-pass holders, about 40 percent. However, the administration has declined to specify the total number of passes currently circulating.
Biden’s White House established the written protocol following a 2019 incident at the Trump White House.
At the time, Trump’s White House barred Playboy reporter Brian Karem after an altercation at the Rose Garden. The Trump administration was ordered to reinstate Karem, and the administration was forbidden from citing “professionalism” as a sole cause for suspension.
The D.C. Circuit Court said, “Without any contextual guideposts, ‘professionalism,’ standing alone, remains too murky to provide fair notice here.”
Four years later, The Daily Signal has made a similar opposite criticism. The outlet criticized the measure as too broad, and it took issue with the new guideposts for barring a reporter after 14 years.
Speaking to The Washington Post, Karem’s lawyer criticized Biden’s new guidelines as “unduly vague,” and Karem himself has doubted their legality.
“If they’re trying to get rid of a reporter because they don’t like the question or because they think yelling out a question is rude, I’d just refer them to the Acosta and Karem cases,” Karem told The Washington Post, referring to himself in the third person. “They will lose.”
The Horn editorial team