AG Blanche addresses White House news outlet ban amid litigation, calls access 'a privilege ... not a right'

Attorney General Todd Blanche on Sunday addressed the Trump administration's decision to ban three mainstream news outlets from accessing the White House, saying that President Donald Trump had not "denied access" to the organizations and asserting that it is a "privilege ... not a right" to be at the White House.

"The president hasn't denied access. That's not the right way to describe it. This is -- what the president has said is that he is sick and tired of certain media outlets just refusing to report accurate news," Blanche said in an exclusive interview with "This Week" co-anchor Martha Raddatz. "There's still obviously litigation going on, but the important thing, Martha, is to know that ... being in the White House is a privilege. It's not a right."

In the early hours Thursday, Judge Timothy Kelly issued a temporary restraining order that required the White House to temporarily restore credentials of journalists working for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Kelly said in his ruling that he believed the outlets cleared the "high bar" required to grant a TRO.

Journalists were allowed back onto the White House grounds later Thursday and primary television pool coverage resumed Friday for the final day of Chinese President Xi Jinping's official state visit. But on Saturday, there was no TV pool coverage for the president's trip to a football game in Tennessee; CNN was scheduled to be network covering the president that day, but they said their access to Air Force One was blocked.

Blanche said it wasn't unusual for a news outlet to not be allowed onto the president's plane.

"The White House routinely decides who can go on Air Force One. This wasn't a a one-time denial of CNN. There's all kinds of times when certain reporters are not flying or are flying," according to Blanche, who added, "it's not unusual, and as a matter of fact, it's common every time the president travels that he and his team decide which reporters get to travel with the president."

Blanche claimed the three news outlets that were subject to the White House ban "refuse to report anything accurately," which he said presented a "national security problem."

"When you have complete misinformation coming out of the White House that affects our relationship with our foreign partners, that affects our relationship with our foreign enemies -- and so this is just not about the fact that they're refusing to report accurate news. It's all about the information that the American people have a right to hear coming out of of our what should be respected media outlets."

Judge Kelly, however, was skeptical in his TRO ruling that national security was the true reason for the ban.

"For one thing, nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was 'banning' Plaintiffs from the White House -- instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting," Kelly wrote.

Hours after announcing the ban on social media, Trump was asked in the Oval Office if there was any "particular reason or particular story" that prompted it.

"No, no. It's -- it's really just cumulative stories over the last two years. You get sick of it," the president said.

On "This Week," Blanche said he wouldn't "get into what the judge says" because the litigation is ongoing, but added "our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security."

When Raddatz pressed Blanche to provide specific examples of stories with which the White House has taken issue, Blanche declined to do so.

Artificial intelligence 'vital to our national security'

On the issue of artificial intelligence, the attorney general echoed the president's position on the technology, describing it as "so important and vital to our national security interests and to the success of this country that the United States lead in this space."

Trump has said it's critical that the U.S. continues to dominate the AI space, citing competition with China specifically.

"Whoever wins AI, WINS! We are leading now over China, and everyone else, and I’m going to keep it that way! I’m not going to stifle Growth, of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution, or the Internet, itself," he posted on social media Monday.

Some AI company leaders are calling for an industry-wide slowdown amid growing concerns about how the rapid pace of development. Multiple incidents of AI agents acting autonomously have come to light in recent months, including instances where AI agents infiltrated outside companies without the agents' parent companies' awareness as it happened.

Last week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that OpenAI agent "infiltrated" a government public health website earlier this summer. This weekend, OpenAI confirmed that its models interacted with U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, behavior the company discovered amid an ongoing review into its AI agents' behaviors.

Blanche acknowledged that "there's going to be adjustments that have to be made" around AI as the industry continues to develop, but he argued the companies themselves already have the ability to "adjust the technology" as needed.

"In the meantime, the answer is not to just try to all of a sudden try to regulate this in a way that will make us second or third place in the world as far as being being the leaders in this space," Blanche said.

During his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York Tuesday, Trump said of AI, "We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice."

Asked what that meant, Blanche said, "What it means is that we have a ton of laws -- criminal laws, civil laws -- that are already in place and on the books that allow us to charge individuals, to charge companies in the right circumstances when there's crimes committed, and so the answer isn't always more laws, more laws, more laws."

"When there are crimes committed, we have a lot of tools already, and the federal Title 18 gives us a lot of a lot of ways to go after criminals and bad actors in the AI space and other spaces," Blanche continued. "So when the president talks about about the fact that the Department of Justice and the FBI and [Homeland Security Investigations], they can go and arrest bad actors in this space, that's what he means, and it's true, and that's what we're doing."