Jake Tapper made an on-air plea Sunday to United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz, asking the official to meet with President Donald Trump about allowing CNN back in the White House press pool.
The network was barred from flying on Air Force One on Saturday as part of its duties covering the president on behalf of major networks. No outlet was announced to replace CNN for the trip, meaning there was no press pool coverage of the president on Saturday.
“I would just ask if you could please convey to President Trump to let CNN back in the pool,” Tapper told Waltz on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday morning. “It was not okay when President Obama tried to freeze Fox out of the pool back in 2009. I don’t think we want a world where presidents decide who gets to cover them.”
Waltz, who was nominated by Trump to be U.N. Ambassador in May 2025, was quick to defer to the president’s reasoning that CNN was barred from the press pool because it did not give “fair and objective and well-sourced reporting.”
“We need a free and fair and honest press corps without an agenda that tries to take facts to fit a narrative,” Waltz fired back. “President Trump’s frustrated. By the way, there are over, what? 50 seats in the press room? I don’t think all of them, like Washington Post or New York Times, are exactly positive towards this administration. That’s a false narrative that (this) is about negative reporting. We need fair and objective reporting for the country, and that’s President Trump’s point.”
Waltz went on to suggest that there is a “negative agenda” in the reporting of the outlets barred from access to the administration, and that Trump is simply “frustrated with this media bias.”
“As has every single president that I’ve ever covered been frustrated with the press,” Tapper retorted, before thanking Waltz for joining the program.
A week before CNN was removed from the press pool on Air Force One, Trump’s administration blocked the network, along with MS NOW and Politico, from the White House press pool and had their access cards seized. A federal judge ordered for the Trump administration to reinstate their access days later. The three outlets have teamed to sue Trump over the ban on violations of First Amendment rights.
