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A War of Attrition

Columbia Journalism Review · Ivan L. Nagy · last updated

Theodore Boutrous on taking the White House and Pentagon press access cases.

On September 18, Theodore Boutrous Jr., a prominent appellate and media lawyer, was preparing to take a vacation. Boutrous, a partner at the firm of Gibson Dunn, had been busy representing the New York Times in its lawsuit over access to the Pentagon. Now his phone rang: David Vigilante, the head of legal for CNN, needed to talk. Via Truth Social diktat, Donald Trump had just banished CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House. In minutes, Boutrous mapped out the structure of a complaint. “It was just a matter of expanding it, fleshing it out and getting all the evidence together,” he told me. 

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