A rather prosaic golf course tucked in a corner of the National Mall has become the center of Washington politics as President Trump pushed for a “world-class” makeover and derided the judge standing in his way as a “crazed lunatic” on Monday.
Mr. Trump said on social media that work on his redesign at East Potomac Golf Links would begin “IMMEDIATELY” — a claim that his officials disputed hours later during a hearing before U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes.
Judge Reyes said she has become the target of over-the-top criticism, including possibly death threats, over her actions in the case.
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“If this is where we are, a federal judge is getting death threats over a golf course … I really don’t think that’s what the Founders envisioned,” she said.
She presided over six hours of hearings as she sought to get to the bottom of why the National Park Service felled more than 400 trees on the course on Oct. 10, despite what the judge thought was a clear instruction to give substantial notice before any major changes at the park.
Judge Reyes, a Biden appointee, dismissed the testimony of Park Service officials who said the tree-cutting was part of a 2019 plan to restore the golf course to its original open design, removing trees that had emerged over the years to clog the fairways and block views.
To Judge Reyes, Mr. Trump’s redesign was behind it all.
“The trees were cut down as part of the plan,” she said.
Amid all the other presidential actions, including the Iran war and efforts to curb stubborn inflation, the golf course has become an unlikely battleground over Mr. Trump’s powers and the courts’ ability to check him.
Mr. Trump escalated the situation over the last couple of days with a series of social media posts that seemed to contradict what his attorneys had been arguing in court, and certainly got Judge Reyes’ attention.
After his own government officials repeatedly told Judge Reyes the tree cutting was not part of Mr. Trump’s vision for the golf course and no decisions had been made on the renovations, he undercut them with a series of social media posts Sunday and Monday.
On Sunday, he declared the redesign a done deal and said the course would close Nov. 15 and be shut down for 15 months of work.
He followed up later Sunday with another post in which he said course designer Tom Fazio’s design was an “initial concept” and that final decisions would be made by government “experts in parks and recreation.”
Then came Monday’s early-morning attack on Judge Reyes, in which Mr. Trump sped up his apparent timeline, saying work “is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY.”
He also attacked the judge.
“The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” he said.
Those tapes are recordings of last week’s hearing, which Judge Reyes opened with a 20-minute dressing-down in which she declared herself “furious” at the government. During the rest of that proceeding — and continuing through Monday’s four-hour hearing — she said she was “unamused” and “beyond disappointed” in the government and called the administration’s justifications “preposterous” and “totally beyond the pale.”
The Justice Department asked that Judge Reyes make the recording public as part of an effort to have her recuse herself from the case.
In a stern opinion late Sunday, just hours before the latest hearing, she said she was not going anywhere.
She acknowledged her use of “strong words” but said they were justified by the government’s behavior. She said Justice Department attorneys sought to “weaponize selective quotations” of hers to make her look more unhinged than she was.
She responded with her own selected statements, which she said showed she had been fair.
“The government has not met its burden to demonstrate that the court’s actions and words demand disqualification,” Judge Reyes wrote.
She was generally less harsh in her approach Monday, though at one point, after a Justice Department attorney suggested she was yelling, she started questioning other attorneys present as to whether they agreed.
“I want you to tell me if I’ve been yelling,” she said to one Justice Department attorney.
He refused to answer, but Abbe Lowell, an attorney for the D.C. Preservation League, which has challenged Mr. Trump’s renovation plans, assured the judge she had been “far from yelling.”
During testimony Monday, two government officials — Interior Department Deputy Chief of Staff Gregory Wischer and acting Director of the National Park Service Jessica Bowron — said that despite Mr. Trump’s social media words, they had seen no plans for immediate work on the renovation and did not know about an imminent closure.
The Justice Department also said there was no renovation contract.
Judge Reyes then repeatedly tried to get the Justice Department to say Mr. Trump was wrong in his social media posts.
“What I’m hearing from the Department of Justice is, ‘Ignore that,’” she said.
Government attorneys would not agree with that, but instead urged the judge to see Mr. Trump’s social media posts as aspirations or guidance that the agencies will seek to carry out.
“The plan is not final,” a Justice Department attorney told her.
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