The press corps in Olympia are the “enemies of the American people,” the Plastics in Mean Girls, and Democratic party operatives, so says right-wing podcaster Brandi Kruse. She detests them. And she wants to join them.
On a recent podcast, Kruse showed a video of several reporters huddled around a press table in the House chamber. “Those are the enemies of the American people,” Kruse said. Kruse accused the Olympia press corps of working for the Democrats. “Your questions [to Democrats] will probably suck” she said while showing the video.
Early this year Kruse and two allies, Discovery Institute fellow Jonathan Choe, and 570 KVI radio host Ari Hoffman, applied for press passes to the Democratic side of the House chamber in Olympia’s Capitol dome. That they didn’t get them was discriminatory, the trio and their attorney say.
The three plaintiffs live in the Seattle area—and rarely make the sixty-mile drive to the capitol campus.
For a long time, Kruse, a former Fox 13 reporter, said she wasn’t a journalist to justify her political actions—speaking at Republican dinners, campaigning for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, and boosting a campaign to ban trans girls from sports—but started calling herself one again when the press pass issue surfaced a year-and-a-half ago.
Choe, fired by KOMO for blasting out Proud Boys propaganda in 2022, reports for the Charlie Kirk-founded Turning Point USA on top of his Discovery Institute work. Hoffman is a Rush Limbaugh-like Seattle talk radio host that has campaigned for two initiatives, including the one to remove trans girls from girls sports. All three of them take strong positions on policies and bills in the Legislature, which is exactly why the Clerk denied their press passes.
In rejecting Kruse’s application, the clerk’s office quoted a passage from the Capitol Correspondents Association’s guidelines that a line needed to be established between professional journalism and politicking.
On March 10, U.S. District Court Judge David Estudillo ruled: “The court acknowledges both parties have legitimate interests at stake here, but … the plaintiffs have not shown a likelihood of success on the merits.”
Kruse and Choe did not respond to requests for interviews. Jerry Cornfield, president of the correspondents association, also declined to comment. Hoffman declined to be interviewed. “I don’t give interviews to antisemitic communist rags,” he wrote in an email. [Though he did lobby against a new levy in front of the SECB last year.]
A hodgepodge of rules governs press access to Washington’s Senate and House chambers. Anyone with a Clerk-issued press pass can freely access both the Democratic and Republican sides of the Senate chamber. But it’s fairly easy to get to either side without a pass. All a person needs is a communications staffer, a security person, or a legislator to escort them. House Republicans will escort Kruse, Choe, and Hoffman into their side of the House. But the House Democrats won’t because of the trio’s conflicts of interests.
As things stand, the trio can go where they please, unless Democrats hold a press conference on their side of the House chamber. Even then, a TVW livestream shows the action on a big television screen just outside the chamber. If any of the trio has questions following such a press conference, he or she can send a message into the House chamber to ask the appropriate legislator to come to the chamber door to talk, which is a common Olympia practice by lobbyists and members of the public.
After suing the Washington House and the Capitol Correspondents Association for permanent press passes in Thurston County, the trio got the case moved to federal court in Tacoma on First Amendment grounds.
At a hearing for a temporary restraining order for passes in the last three days of the session that doubled as a forum on whether the plaintiffs’ case could succeed on its merits, US District Court Judge David Estudillo ruled it was unlikely to succeed. Blurring the line between reporter and political activist would “raise questions about the motives of everyone in the press corps,” he wrote.
The trio’s attorney, Jackson Maynard of the conservative Citizen Action Defense Fund, and Kruse argued that mainstream newspapers ran editorials, and that was basically the same thing as their political work. Maynard acknowledged his clients were involved in political causes, but said they aren’t paid for that work and thus had no conflict of interest. Neither argument worked.
Maynard’s clients plan to pursue their case, but have not yet decided on what path they will take.
