A federal judge sounded incredulous about the Trump administration’s rationale for plans to close East Potomac Park on Sunday, suggesting at a hearing Friday that officials had invented justifications after President Donald Trump posted his desire to plow forward with a redesign of the golf course.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes spent hours grilling a government lawyer about why she should allow officials to close the park on Sunday and what, if any, work would take place if she lets them proceed.
Throughout the daylong hearing, the judge repeatedly voiced frustration with what she said was the government’s failure to give her clear answers in a challenge that could determine the future of a recreation area used by runners, cyclists, bird-watchers and many others.
Reyes did not announce a decision from the bench Friday, but she is expected to rule in the coming days on a request to temporarily halt the closure, which the plaintiffs say is an unlawful step toward renovations.
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The case has escalated in recent weeks into a high-profile confrontation over the judge’s authority, presidential powers and senior officials’ candor in the courtroom — and Friday kept that tone.
Reyes scoffed when Adam Gustafson, a Justice Department attorney, told her the administration was entitled to “presumption of regularity” — the legal principle in which judges generally presume that government officials are following the law and acting in good faith.
Reyes fired back: “You may want to move on from that point.”
Administration officials have said in court papers that the park closure is necessary because of safety hazards along a seawall that has been deteriorating for years. They also say there will be no one to operate the course starting Nov. 15 because the administration ended a lease with the organization that had managed it, National Links Trust.
But Trump had previously posted on Truth Social that the course and surrounding grounds in southwest D.C. would close “as scheduled” that day so renovations can begin to turn it into an elite championship course.
Preservation groups suing to block the project argue that the public-safety claims are a thinly veiled maneuver to give the administration cover to begin its transformation of the grounds. They are seeking an order from the judge blocking the closure at least temporarily.
Reyes has erupted at government lawyers over their equivocations in court and opened a misconduct investigation into Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and other officials over shifting statements about Trump’s plans for the golf course.
Reyes continued to apply pressure on Friday, opening the hearing with a stern warning about whistleblower allegations that administration officials were destroying documents related to Trump’s construction projects.
Under questioning by the judge, Woodward said he wasn’t aware of any such document destruction linked to the golf course. Reyes threatened “serious consequences” if she learned that any documents had been intentionally or recklessly trashed.
“I will start proceedings on sanctions and contempt in less than a zeptosecond,” she said, referring to the shortest unit of time ever measured in a laboratory.
Much of the hearing focused on officials’ assertions that the golf course needed to be closed in large part because of the crumbling seawall.
Reyes pointed out that safety concerns related to the wall were first identified more than a decade ago and that the government hadn’t mentioned them in court documents until late last month. She noted that some 30,000 people had just run a marathon along the path with no problems, questioning whether there was really a “sudden onset of safety issues” that required closure by Nov. 15.
Nor did she appear to buy the administration’s argument that the course should be closed because National Links Trust, the operator, would no longer be operating as of Sunday.
The administration, she said, wasn’t responding to “a lack of an operator — they created a lack of an operator.” She compared the situation to setting a house on fire and then trying to claim insurance proceeds. “You set the house on fire,” she said.
Gustafson, the government’s lawyer, stumbled on straightforward questions about whether the Interior Department, the lead defendant in the case, would issue final decisions about Trump’s redesign.
“I don’t know the mental state of anyone at Interior,” he said.
The judge pressed Gustafson to explain whether the administration would take any steps to move forward with the redesign if the course were to close as proposed this weekend. He said he was unaware of any plans to do so.
Justice Department lawyers have sought to shield the administration’s work on the redesign from even the most basic scrutiny in court.
Before Friday’s hearing, the DOJ fought to keep secret the names of officials involved in the proposal to overhaul the property, claiming national attention on the case had brought “outrage and death threats.”
Reyes rejected the request this week, saying two of the officials had been discussed in open court and that there was “little possibility of prejudice from the disclosure of the names of government employees acting within the scope of their employment.”
The administration is also fighting Reyes’ appointment of a special master to investigate whether Woodward and others misled her.
Reyes has said she would tap Jessie Liu, a respected former U.S. attorney who worked in the first Trump administration, to head the probe. Reyes wants to know whether officials deliberately avoided notifying her about the administration’s removal of hundreds of trees and whether they were truthful in earlier proceedings.
In a filing Friday, government lawyers argued there was “no reasonable basis for conducting an ethics inquiry in this case.” They said court rules only allow a special master in narrow circumstances and with the parties’ consent.
“If it’s not a special master,” Reyes said at the close of Friday’s hearing, “it’s going to be me.”
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