Judge orders DOJ to clarify Trump golf course closure plan

A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday ordered a senior Justice Department official to appear in court and say whether the government has any plan to close the East Potomac public golf course on or around Nov. 15, after President Donald Trump said it would shut that day.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes directed Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. to attend a status hearing Friday or Monday, ABC News and The Independent reported. The order followed a preliminary injunction she issued Monday that bars further tree removal at the course and requires 10 business days of written notice before any “irreparable modification” to the park while the lawsuit continues.

The ruling is the latest turn in a court fight that began in February, when the DC Preservation League and two local golfers sued the Interior Department over the plan to rebuild the 36-hole public course. We first reported on the planned 15-month closure on Oct. 19.

Reyes wrote in the order that the case had shifted from golf to reconciling sworn statements by administration officials with the president’s public statements, ABC News reported. In a 70-page ruling, she found the administration likely violated the National Environmental Policy Act by “segmenting” the environmental impacts of the construction.

“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting president,” Reyes wrote. “And yet, here we are.” She added that if the Justice Department is right that Trump is wrong, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum “can just say so,” and noted that he had not.

Trump posted late Monday that the course will close Nov. 15 “as scheduled” for renovations and that construction would begin immediately, hours before the hearing, according to ABC News. He called the judge’s request for updates “unconstitutional” and said his administration will appeal. He told reporters after a rally Monday night that the project “has a go-ahead” and that he had asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for an “immediate remedy.”

Government lawyers had told the court earlier that there were no plans to close the course. At an Oct. 19 hearing, Woodward said it was “difficult to put my colleague, a non-Senate-confirmed DOJ employee, in a position of contradicting the president,” The Independent reported.

The injunction follows the removal of hundreds of healthy trees from the course with little notice to the plaintiffs, which Reyes criticized at an earlier hearing. The plaintiffs say the work causes irreversible damage. Critics of the plan say it would make the course unaffordable for the public. Neither the White House nor the Justice Department was quoted in the reports reviewed by Canada News Media responding to the plaintiffs’ claims beyond Trump’s own posts and remarks.

The dispute is one of several court fights over Trump’s building projects in Washington, including a White House ballroom and a planned National Garden of American Heroes in West Potomac Park, where The Independent reported judges have issued injunctions or restraining orders in several cases.

The status hearing is the next date to watch. Reyes has not said which of the two days she will hold it. The case is developing, and details may change as more reporting becomes available.

The ruling arrives as Trump campaigns across the country before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, a stretch our Supreme Court election rulings story covers from the legal side.

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Via ABC News and The Independent.