Playboy White House correspondent and CNN political analyst Brian Karem sued the White House on Tuesday to get his hard pass back after it was suspended in the wake of a July Rose Garden confrontation with a former Trump official.

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Theodore Boutrous Jr. is representing Karem in the suit, filed in District Court for the District of Columbia. The complaint seeks a declaration that the suspension was unconstitutional, in addition to the full reinstatement of the Karem’s “hard pass,” which guarantees him daily access to the White House.

“This court should vacate the suspension and order that Karem’s hard pass be immediately restored,” the complaint said. “The suspension is arbitrary, unlawful, and unconstitutional.”

U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the District of Columbia has been assigned the case.

Boutrous, who represented CNN’s Jim Acosta in a similar case last year, first promised the lawsuit in a statement Friday. The attorney at the time called the suspension of Karem’s hard pass “yet another example of this administration’s unconstitutional campaign to punish reporters and press coverage that President Trump doesn’t like.”

In Tuesday’s lawsuit, Boutrous cited a lack of specific standards for behavior at the White House as showing that the suspension is unlawful.

Boutrous argues that White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham “did not cite any legal authority authorizing her to order the suspension of a hard pass and admitted that Mr. Karem did not violate any published rule or standard.”

“In the absence of such standards, the determination to suspend Karem’s pass came down to the unbounded post hoc discretion of one person regarding what conduct amounts to a breach of ‘decorum,’ eyebrow movements and all,” the complaint said.

And he said Karem was not “given a fair opportunity” to oppose Grisham’s initial decision to suspend his pass, calling the White House spokeswoman “a biased decision maker who works for a president at war with what he calls the ‘Lamestream media’ that are the ‘enemy of the people.’”

Boutrous further argued that Grisham’s “arbitrary” actions indicate that Karem’s “suspension is clearly meant to punish and deter his reporting on the administration rather than based on anything he said in the Rose Garden in July.”

“As such, the suspension is an impermissible content-based regulation of speech, and an attempt to censor the press and exclude from the White House reporters who challenge and dispute the President’s point of view,” the complaint said.

Grisham first informed Karem of the preliminary decision to suspend his hard pass Aug. 2, about three weeks after his confrontation with former White House aide Sebastian Gorka made headlines.

During a spat in the White House’s Rose Garden, Karem was filmed shouting at Gorka to “go outside and have a long talk.” Gorka then crossed over to where Karem was standing, yelling that the CNN political analyst is a “punk.”

The two men interacted again inside the White House minutes later, where Karem asked for a handshake. Gorka, who was forced out of the Trump administration two years ago, refused and yelled at Karem, “you’re done!”

In an Aug. 5 letter responding to the initial decision, Boutrous argued that the hard pass couldn’t be revoked under Grisham’s claim that there are “widely shared understanding[s]” about how the media should behave at the White House, and that a more formal set of guidelines needs to be in place in order to determine that Karem violated them.

And he also alleged that Grisham deprived Karem of his due process rights by deciding to suspend the Playboy correspondent’s pass without giving the reporter an opportunity to respond.

“[Y]ou decided instead to single out Mr. Karem for retaliation even while the president celebrates those, including Mr. Gorka, who have behaved far worse,” Boutrous wrote, referring to a tweet from President Donald Trump about the incident. “This exhibits a clear and prohibited bias based on content of speech and identity of the speaker.”

Karem also provided a statement to the White House, maintaining that he is known among the press corps for his impersonations, like that of Rodney Dangerfield, and that is what he was doing during the altercation in an attempt to defuse the situation with Gorka.

But in her Aug. 16 letter making the final decision to suspend the pass, Grisham was adamant that Karem behaved unprofessionally during the incident.

“Under the circumstances, Mr. Karem’s words and gestures together created the impression to a reasonable observer that Mr. Karem was suggesting a physical confrontation,” Grisham wrote.

She pointed to an interview with a Secret Service agent who intervened on the scene, who apparently told the press secretary that he intervened because he “believed there was a risk of a physical altercation.”

Grisham also said she doesn’t find Karem’s claim that he was doing a Dangerfield impression “credible,” as she didn’t think “any reasonable observer would have seen anything about Mr. Karem’s choice of words, mannerisms, or inflection that remotely evoked Rodney Dangerfield.”

“An insult to guests is still an insult even if delivered while mimicking a comedian,” she added.

The press secretary also pushed back against Boutrous’s claims that suspending Karem’s press pass was in response to the content of his reporting, calling the allegations “baseless.”

“The very fact that the president has continued to call on Mr. Karem demonstrates that there has been no effort to silence his journalism,” Grisham wrote.

This lawsuit sets up a redux of the case last year over the suspension of the hard pass for Acosta, CNN’s White House correspondent.

Boutrous successfully argued against the suspension of Acosta’s hard pass in November 2018, with U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly of the District of Columbia granting a temporary restraining order that reinstated the credential for two weeks.

The White House then agreed to restore Acosta’s pass, but said it was adding new restrictions for reporters at press conferences.