U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes rebuffed the Trump administration’s demand that she give up a case involving the golf course on the National Mall, insisting she is not biased against the president and his team.
The demand came after she spent nearly 20 minutes yelling at Justice Department lawyers to open a hearing last week, pronouncing herself “furious” at what she saw as a betrayal of her trust by the government.
And she said it was the government that created the problems the Justice Department now complains of by felling hundreds of trees on the golf course earlier this month, with scant notice, on a three-day holiday weekend. She said that broke her admonition that no work be done unless she was informed.
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Judge Reyes, a Biden appointee, said the Justice Department tried to “weaponize selective quotations,” cherry-picking her most extreme statements to paint her as biased. She responded with her own chosen statements 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,” she wrote.
Her ruling staying on the case came just hours before she is scheduled to continue her quest to get to the bottom of the decision to cut the trees.
She has a hearing slated for Monday morning where she has demanded testimony from the head of the National Park Service and a senior Interior Department official.
Park service officials who testified at a snap hearing last week 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 had turned the links-style course into more of a parkland course.
Judge Reyes didn’t buy it.
“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.
She said 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, park service officials testified Monday that the work wasn’t urgent and could be done at any time.
Judge Reyes then suggested that Mr. Trump’s demands for action were behind the tree-cutting.
“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.
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