Another way in which American officials abuse trespassing laws to enforce their own rules

I wrote earlier how American cops routinely abuse trespassing laws in order to trick people into giving them their ID even in situations where the cops have no legal right to demand it. (In summary: Solicit a trespass from a nearby property, even if the person has never even been on that property, and then claim that they need the person's ID to enforce the trespass. That's actually not how American law works, but cops trick people with this ruse all the time anyway.)

Well, apparently there is another way in which American government officials (illegally) abuse trespassing laws in order to bypass their legal duty to openness.

You see, thanks to the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, there are very strong and strict laws in the country that maximize the openness of what governmental institutions do. Very typically this includes, for example, that most official county, city and state meetings are open to the public, particularly to members of the press (with very few well-defined exceptions.)

So how are these governmental officials bypassing these laws?

By organizing these meetings in the premises of a private property, such as a privately owned hotel, and then having the owners of that private property trespass all members of the press, and anybody they don't want attending the meeting.

What a clever way to bypass the openness laws. See a clear example of this for example here.

Of course even in this case that's not how the law works. American law actually takes precisely this kind of situation into account: When government officials decide to hold their public meetings within the premises of private property, that changes the legal nature of those premises. The area where the meeting is held (and the access to it) become essentially temporarily public property for the purposes of the meeting, and for its duration. By renting or giving access to that space to public officials for such a public meeting, the private property owner accepts that that space becomes de facto public property for the duration of the meeting.

But, of course, these governmental officials don't care.

And why should they? They have no accountability and will receive no consequences for this. The higher their position in government, the less likely it is for any consequences. (Even if a citizen sues and gets awarded some compensation, it will be the taxpayers who will be paying that compensation, not these governmental officials.)

The don't care. They can just keep doing this same thing, no matter how many times they are sued and how many "trespassing" charges are being dismissed. They don't care because they don't have to care. There are no personal consequences for doing this again and again.