After a long, tumultuous hearing on Monday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes is weighing whether to issue a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump administration from removing more trees from a historic public park golf course in Washington, D.C.
Trump posted his plans to shutter the East Potomac Park Golf Course on Sunday and again on Monday, announcing that it would become a “World Class Championship Golf Course.”
The administration felled hundreds of trees from the public course even though litigation brought by D.C. residents and the D.C. Preservation League was still pending. The judge had ordered officials to give notice when making any changes. When they did not, Reyes admitted she was furious with the government and ordered Interior Department officials to testify.
On Monday, acting National Park Service director Jessica Bowron and Interior Department deputy chief of staff Greg Wischer testified that they were unaware of plans for a new course and that hundreds of healthy, noninvasive trees were removed under an existing 2019 renovation plan. Reyes took issue with those claims.
“I am telling you right now I don’t think those trees were cut down because of the 2019 [plan]. There’s no reasonable inference that that was the case. That doesn’t mean individuals testifying were lying. They may have been told, ‘here’s what you’re doing,’” she said.
Trump has referred to the judge as a “crazed lunatic,” and lawyers for the administration filed a motion to disqualify her ahead of Monday’s hearing. Reyes denied the motion.
When DOJ lawyers insisted Trump could not be checked by the judiciary, Reyes told them that was antithetical to what the founders meant when they wrote in the Federalist Papers that “ambition should check ambition.”
Reyes also told DOJ lawyers that she had been receiving death threats because of this case.
“If that is happening, and even if it’s not, the kind of emails I’ve been receiving, the kind of voicemails I’ve been getting, that this is where we are… that a federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course. I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned,” she said.