WASHINGTON — The judge presiding over a court fight involving President Donald Trump’s plans to redo a golf course on federal land indicated Monday that she plans to extend her order blocking the administration from chopping down more trees at the site.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said at the seven-hour hearing that she believes it’s likely necessary to extend her order because she has already found the government acted in “bad faith” when it abruptly chopped down over 400 trees at the course over the Columbus Day holiday weekend.
She said she didn’t buy the administration’s arguments that the tree clearing was unrelated to Trump’s renovation plan, which he said should begin “immediately.”
“I mean, there is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happened at the same time. There just isn’t,” she said.
Lawyers for the Justice Department had argued there was no renovation plan in place — a stance that Trump undermined Sunday on social media when he said he was “pleased to announce” the Interior Department and “famed Golf Course Architect, Tom Fazio, has developed a plan to build a World Class Championship Golf Course on the site of the current East Potomac Golf Links, located in Washington, D.C.”
Trump, an avid golfer, said the renovation would begin “on November 15th, when the old Course will be closed to play.”
He stepped up the time frame in a post Monday morning ahead of the hearing, calling the suit seeking to preserve the current course “ridiculous.”
“The experts at ‘Interior’ are allowed to do this First Class renovation ‘as of right.’ They do not need an approval. Work is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!” he wrote.
During the hearing, administration officials maintained they weren’t aware of any concrete renovation plan.
“There is no plan to close the course,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward told Reyes, characterizing Trump’s directive as something he would “like” to do.
Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron told Reyes that the first time she’d heard of the planned closure was in Trump’s post. “I don’t have any information on the referenced plan,” she testified.
Interior Department chief of staff Gregory Wischer, asked the same question by the judge, also said that he was “not aware” of any work planned to begin Nov. 15.
The plaintiffs, a preservation group and two Washington residents, allege Trump’s plan would change the character of the 100-year-old site, which consists of three courses for varying skill sets. They said Trump’s renovation would transform it into a single championship-style course.
Trump told reporters Monday that the site is “old, tired, beaten up, it’s useless. It doesn’t do much business. We want to do something great for Washington. We’re going to basically build a better golf course. You can call it a renovation. It should be very simple. It’s something the Interior Department is allowed to do, absolutely. All they want to do is fix up their property.”
Reyes cited Trump’s posts as potential evidence of bad faith on the government’s part.
“We did not go from zero to ‘work is scheduled to begin immediately’ in 60 seconds,” she said.
Trump blasted Reyes as a “crazed lunatic” in his post Monday morning.
Reyes didn’t directly refer to the insult, but she said at the end of the hearing that she had gotten messages from her brother and mother, who were “freaking out” after they heard a CNN report that she had received death threats — something that often happens when Trump lashes out at a judge on social media.
“That a federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course — I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned,” Reyes said.
The Justice Department had argued in court filings over the weekend that Reyes, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, should recuse herself from the case because she was biased and yelled at Justice Department attorneys during the last hearing. They contended that her “histrionics in prior hearings have clearly demonstrated she is no longer impartial.”
Reyes denied the request in an order Sunday. She acknowledged that she had been “furious” with the administration for failing to make good on its promises it would let her know well in advance whether any major work was being done on the course.
“So what happened? Not sudden onset bias,” she wrote. “Instead, the Government decided to remove over 500 healthy, non-invasive trees from East Potomac Golf Course. It waited until 4:55 p.m. on the Friday of a holiday weekend to give notice that it would begin removing trees within 15 hours. It removed nearly 430 trees in one day and would have destroyed hundreds more but for a rain delay.”