The Trump administration said Tuesday that it would no longer reserve a regular slot in the presidential press pool for three independent newswires that have participated for decades, including The Associated Press.

The move is the latest effort by the White House to exert more control over the dedicated press corps that reports on its day-to-day activities. It was also a new wrinkle in an unfolding legal battle with the AP, whose journalists have been barred for the past two months from covering small-scale events with the president.

A federal judge said last week that the White House had to restore full access to AP journalists, ruling that the administration’s ban amounted to a violation of the First Amendment. The White House has appealed and a hearing is set for today.

The presidential press pool is a small, rotating group of reporters who are granted access to more intimate events with the president, such as Oval Office receptions, and relay the proceedings to other journalists and the broader public. It is a logistical accommodation for smaller spaces that cannot fit dozens of reporters, and an opportunity for journalists to interact up close with the president and ask him direct questions.

In February, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent, the administration said it would begin handpicking the members of the pool, wresting control from the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, which decried the move. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps,” the group said at the time.

Tuesday, the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt released a more specific set of guidelines for the press pool, including the elimination of a slot reserved for journalists representing one of three major newswires: the AP, Bloomberg and Reuters.

That slot, Leavitt said, will instead be filled by an additional journalist from a print media outlet, selected from a rotation of several dozen. Reporters at the three newswires still are eligible to fill the print media slot, but they will no longer be granted access to these sorts of presidential events on a near-daily basis. The change was reported earlier by The New York Post.

Lauren Easton, an AP spokesperson, said in a statement Tuesday that the Trump administration’s actions “continue to disregard the fundamental American freedom to speak without government control or retaliation.”

Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief, John Micklethwait, said in a statement: “We deeply regret the decision to remove that permanent level of scrutiny and accountability.”

A Reuters spokesperson said, “We remain committed to covering the White House in an impartial, accurate and independent way.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association said in a statement that the changes “show that the White House is just using a new means to do the same thing: retaliate against news organizations for coverage the White House doesn’t like.”