A federal judge suggested that President Trump lurks behind the National Park Service’s snap decision to chop down hundreds of trees on the golf course that’s part of the National Mall park.
Judge Ana Reyes said she’s tortured to think of another reason why the park service rushed to carry out the mass tree eradication in just four days, despite there being no urgent reason she could see.
“Breakneck speed to clear trees that posed no harm. The reason? Disputed. The budget? Unclear. The environmental impact? Unstudied. The urgency? None. Next steps: bulldoze hundreds more,” Judge Reyes wrote in a scorching opinion late Tuesday.
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She extended her temporary restraining order forbidding any more tree cutting for nearly two weeks. She went further, saying the administration must give three business days’ advance notice before any work at all on the East Potomac Golf Course.
And she has ordered the park service’s director and its deputy chief of staff to appear before her to give sworn testimony next week, as she tries to get to the bottom of why 430 trees were felled in a flurry of cutting Saturday morning.
Park service officials who testified at a snap hearing Monday had said they moved quickly because both funding and crews became available.
They said they were carrying out a seven-year-old Cultural Landscape Report.
That included a plan to return the historic golf course to the more open layout that existed in its original design more than a century ago, taking down trees that had crowded the fairways and turned the links-style course into more of a parkland course.
Judge Reyes didn’t give that explanation any credence in her ruling Tuesday.
Far more telling, she said, was Mr. Trump’s social media post over the summer saying that work to convert the course into a championship-level course would begin Sept. 1.
In that June 28 message, Mr. Trump specifically complained of trees “badly damaged from years of neglect, putting people in great danger from falling branches, and the trees falling themselves.”
The park service had previously done trimming to remove hazardous trees, and had said the work this past weekend was not part of that. Indeed, they testified Monday that the work wasn’t urgent and could be done at any time.
Judge Reyes said still connected this weekend’s trimming to Mr. Trump’s post.
“The court concludes, on this limited record, that government officials raced to undertake the [tree management plan] because President Trump demands haste on his redesign, and not because of some newfound zeal to implement a small part of a seven-year-old CLR,” she wrote.
She even found space in her 21-page ruling to cite Dr. Seuss’s book “The Lorax,” a 1971 volume that shows a rapacious capitalist, the Once-ler, tearing through a pristine forest to feed consumer demand for a useless “Thneed.”
The judge’s self-admitted fury at the Trump administration stems from her feeling of betrayal.
She said she had repeatedly given the government the benefit of the doubt over the last months, brushing aside anti-Trump litigants’ demands that she issue orders forbidding any major changes at the golf course while the case proceeds. She had said she trusted the government to follow her directives not to ask, and so she didn’t feel a formal order was needed.
But this week, after the Saturday slashing, she said all of that trust has been felled with the trees.
She said at Monday’s hearing that she now regrets not issuing formal orders, because then she could be pursuing contempt proceedings for the downed trees.
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