President Donald Trump is blasting the federal judge overseeing litigation involving the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul renovations at a major public Washington, D.C., golf course, after she rejected an effort overnight from the Justice Department to disqualify her from continuing to preside over the case.
Last week, D.C. District Judge Ana Reyes erupted at attorneys for the government after the Interior Department abruptly removed more than 500 trees from East Potomac golf course despite her demanding the administration alert her in advance if it planned any significant alterations to the course given ongoing litigation.
“The United States Department of Interior wants to take a terrible and very unsafe golf course, and make it into a great, safe, and prestigious golf course,” Trump wrote in the post on his social media platform Monday morning. “They have an absolute right to do so. It’s as simple as that! The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?”
The golf course has been the subject of litigation brought by the D.C. Preservation League in response to Trump’s efforts to turn it into a course that could host professional tournaments.
Overnight, Reyes denied a motion from the Justice Department’s No. 3-ranked official Stanley Woodward seeking her recusal from the case where he had argued she harbored a clear political bias against the Trump administration.
“It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion,” Reyes said in her response. “But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the Government fails to meet the standard for recusal. And the Court does not, on its review, conclude it is mandatory.”
An evidentiary hearing is set for Monday morning where Reyes has ordered Woodward to appear after Trump announced in a Sunday social media post that full-scale renovations of East Potomac would begin on Nov. 15.
On Sunday, Reyes asked for the government to clarify whether its previous comments to her that no “final agency action” setting out a renovation schedule for the course had been formalized.
Woodward responded late Sunday that Trump’s post did not contradict the government’s position.
“Defendants maintain that there is no final agency action here,” Woodward said. “First, the plan is not final because the Park Service has not completed its review and the details of the proposal are subject to change during the review process. Second, any redesign of the golf course is not ‘agency action’ to begin with because it is not the kind of regulation that constitutes a ‘rule, order, license, sanction, [or] relief’ under the [Administrative Procedure Act].”
Reyes has pushed for two top Trump administration officials to testify at Monday’s hearing, including an appointee at the Interior Department overseeing many of Trump’s “beautification” projects for D.C. The Trump administration is expected to vigorously oppose having those officials testify.
Reyes has said she wants answers about whether the administration deliberately moved under cover of a holiday weekend to begin removing hundreds of trees at East Potomac despite her repeated demands that the administration not do so without giving her advance notice.
The government testified that the plan to cut down trees was part of a plan put in place in 2019 to remove dead, dying and hazardous trees around the golf course.
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