Trump’s DOJ probes major TV networks over response to White House ban of

The Justice Department is investigating the five major US TV networks for possible antitrust violations, opening yet another front in the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against the press.

The probe, which one leading First Amendment group called nonsensical, concerns the TV pool, a long-standing arrangement that was disrupted last month when President Donald Trump banned CNN from the White House grounds. The pool is a small, rotating group of journalists that provides coverage of the president and represents the larger press corps.

The TV pool chair at the time said that with Trump “preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties,” there would be “no replacement pool put in place.”

There was no pooled TV coverage of Trump’s events for several days until a federal judge issued an order temporarily halting Trump’s ban on CNN, MSNOW and Politico. That litigation is ongoing, and the Justice Department is defending Trump’s action in court.

Now, the Justice Department is also probing how the TV pool functions. The highly unusual inquiry was first reported by The New York Times on Saturday. It comes two weeks after Trump ally Laura Loomer publicly encouraged the DOJ to challenge the networks on antitrust grounds.

In a statement to CNN, a Justice Department spokesperson confirmed the contours of the investigation.

“Members of the television press pool have boycotted covering White House events. Group boycotts among commercial competitors can violate the Sherman Act,” the spokesperson said. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws.”

Representatives for the five networks that have made up the pool for decades — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC — either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday night.

Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said the investigation “appears to be a pretext for seeking records from the networks about how they are covering daily White House events during a media ban the president himself put in place.”

Brown added, “The decisions news organizations make about coverage are protected by the First Amendment, and summoning antitrust authority, on top of the retaliatory actions the White House has already taken to bar certain outlets, is another and even more brazen attempt to try to intimidate journalists.”

Some of the networks first learned about the investigation on Friday, two sources with knowledge of the matter said, when attorneys for the networks received government demands for documents relating to the pool, including…