President Trump wrote on social media on Monday that work was “scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY” to overhaul a Washington golf course, escalating tensions with a federal judge who has prohibited the administration from cutting trees at the site.
Mr. Trump’s post came ahead of a morning showdown in federal court over the fate of the course.
Upon learning last week that the Interior Department had cleared hundreds of trees from the course, apparently in preparation for larger changes, the judge, Ana C. Reyes, had prohibited parks officials from taking down more trees until Oct. 26. She also requested that top administration officials appear at the hearing to discuss the issue.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump announced that the course, East Potomac Golf Links, would close for a 14-month renovation on Nov. 15, before returning to social media Monday morning to castigate the judge and announce the project would move forward.
He described Judge Reyes, an appointee of President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as “a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane.” The Justice Department had requested that audio be released of a hearing she conducted last week, in which she angrily took the Trump administration to task for removing trees with minimal notice.
Ahead of the hearing on Monday, Judge Reyes also issued a forceful opinion rebuffing calls by the Justice Department that she recuse herself from the case, denying that the record in the case demonstrated bias, as the administration had alleged.
She pointed out that she had consistently rejected what she described as premature requests by the group suing that she block work at the course. Instead, she wrote that she had approached the case as a “pragmatist” who had urged the parties in July to hammer out an agreement on their own, rather than pre-emptively halt work by court order. She had instead asked the government to provide notice before undertaking major work at the course.
“Between February 13, when this case was filed, and October 11, the court had not barred the government from taking any action in East Potomac, including tree removal,” she wrote.
“It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion,” she added. “But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record. By any objective measure, the Government fails to meet the standard for recusal.”
The post Trump Says Work on Disputed Golf Course Will Begin Immediately appeared first on New York Times.
