The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to recuse herself after she yelled at DOJ lawyers and demanded senior officials appear and testify on whether President Trump prodded them to cut down trees so he could rebuild the golf course on East Potomac Park on the National Mall in Washington.
Judge Ana Reyes kicked off a hearing on Monday with nearly 20 minutes of full-throated yelling at the government’s lawyers, saying she felt betrayed by the tree cutting that happened a couple of days earlier.
She pronounced herself “furious” and “beyond disappointed,” plus called the administration’s arguments “frustrating,” “preposterous” and “totally beyond the pale.”
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The Justice Department says her self-admitted fury means she’s no longer able to be objective.
“Judge Reyes’s histrionics in prior hearings have clearly demonstrated she is no longer impartial,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. wrote in the motion Friday night.
He also asked the court to release the audio of the hearing so the public can hear how angry the judge got. The federal district court in Washington prohibits outsiders’ recording of proceedings, though a public line was available for people to listen in live.
Judge Reyes has asked the D.C. Preservation League, Mr. Trump’s opponent in the case, to respond to the recusal demand by Sunday.
That’s a day before she’s slated to take testimony from Jessica Bowron, the acting director of the National Park Service, and Gregory Wischer, the deputy chief of staff at the Interior Department.
Judge Reyes has signaled that she believes they were acting at Mr. Trump’s behest in ordering the axing of more than 400 trees on Oct. 10.
Park service officials said the cutting has nothing to do with Mr. Trump’s plans for the golf course.
Those officials said it was part of a 7-year-old plan to restore the course to its original vision of open vistas, rather than the crowded parkland setting it’s become in the past century.
And they defended the timing, saying the park service had crews that became available after working on other projects over the summer and into the early autumn.
Judge Reyes wasn’t buying it.
“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 [plan],” she wrote.
The judge’s self-admitted fury at the Trump administration stems from her feeling of betrayal.
She said she repeatedly gave the government the benefit of the doubt over the past months, brushing aside anti-Trump litigants’ demands that she issue orders forbidding any major changes at the golf course while the case proceeded. 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.
The DOJ has made similar strikes against other judges, trying to boot them from cases or raising ethics complaints against them.
Those have largely been unsuccessful, though one in Georgia, Judge Eleanor Ross, did recuse herself from a case on the DOJ’s request.
She had been revealed to have attended a campaign event for Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who unsuccessfully pursued a criminal case against Mr. Trump over his attempt to reverse Georgia’s vote in the 2020 election.
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