Rep. Joyce Beatty wants a federal judge to unseal two documents the Trump administration used to justify its latest attempt to engrave the president’s name onto the Kennedy Center.
In a motion filed Tuesday, Beatty’s attorneys say the records — a building plan and a five-slide PowerPoint presentation — served as the only pretext for what they called a “rushed effort” by a mostly Trump-appointed board of trustees to shutter the facility and circumvent an earlier court ruling ordering the president’s name be scrubbed from the building’s facade.
“As before, these new documents were ‘light-on-details,’ contained no meaningful ‘cost-benefit analysis of the closure,’ and constituted a ‘stacked deck,’” the motion states.
The Ohio Democrat’s attorneys said the Trump administration intentionally obscured the documents from the public without ever filing a formal motion to seal or explaining to the court why the records must remain secret. The court should at minimum agree to release the documents with limited redactions obscuring only sensitive security or financial details, they wrote.
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“This is a case of enormous public interest about public officials’ maintenance of a public memorial to a slain President,” the filing says. “Defendants cannot simply allude to their ‘general interest’ in keeping their documents ‘out of the public eye,’ because doing so would seal everything under the sun in a case of enormous public significance.”
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled against the administration in May, and ordered that all signage and references to the “Trump Kennedy Center” be removed from the building.
The board voted on Aug. 13 to shut the Kennedy Center down in a second round of the legal fight to put Trump’s name on the building. Justice Department lawyers representing the center say the president’s name could go up as soon as next week, though Beatty’s attorneys are seeking to temporarily block the change.
Beatty, an ex officio member of the board of trustees, said the two documents were created just two days before the board convened to shutter the facility, mirroring the board’s previous “hasty attempt.” The construction plan for a full facility closure did not include a thorough cost-benefit analysis, the filing says, while the short PowerPoint was “riddled with internal inconsistencies.”
Government lawyers and officials have warned that the center could deteriorate into an unsafe structure and eventually face demolition if the renovation is halted.
The administration opposes the motion, according to Beatty’s filing. Representatives for the DOJ and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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