Attorneys for President Donald Trump have petitioned for en banc rehearing of a appeals court ruling that barred the president from blocking his critics on Twitter.

In a filing late Friday, Jennifer L. Utrecht, an appellate lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department's civil division, argued that last month's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was "fundamentally misconceived" because it conflated his private account with his role as a public officeholder.

"The constitutional right of an individual to express his views in a public forum comes into play only when the property in question is owned or controlled by the government and the individual's exclusion from that property is the product of state action," the filing said.

"Here, the @realDonaldTrump account belongs to Donald Trump in his personal capacity, and his ability and decision to exclude individuals from that personal property are likewise independent of his public office."

A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit on July 9 upheld a trial court's decision against Trump on First Amendment grounds, ruling that he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with on Twitter. The plaintiffs, represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, are Twitter users who were "blocked" from accessing his social media account.

The court found that Trump's Twitter account qualified as a public forum, which he used to announce official news, including his administration's move to ban transgender service members, and he used his account to announce that he had fired his first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and replaced him with John Kelly.

"In resolving this appeal, we remind the litigants and the public that if the First Amendment means anything, it means that the best response to disfavored speech on matters of public concern is more speech, not less," the court said.

In Friday's filing, Utrecht said the @realDonaldTrump handle was Trump's personal account, and the act of blocking individual users did not involve the use of government power.

"If the panel is correct, public officials who address matters relating to their public office on personal accounts will run the risk that every action taken on that account will be state action subject to constitutional scrutiny," she wrote in the 16-page filing.

The move would aim to put the issue before all 11 commissioned judges of the appeals court. The viability of rehearing petitions has sometimes been questioned. While the case over Trump's Twitter account is a high-profile one, Second Circuit judges have recently reiterated that the court has a "tradition" of declining to grant en banc rehearing of panel decisions.

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