A federal judge on Tuesday barred the Trump administration from removing any more trees from the East Potomac Golf Course until Oct. 26, prolonging a standoff over the Justice Department’s failure to disclose plans to clear trees from the site.
The temporary order followed a dramatic holiday weekend confrontation, after Judge Ana C. Reyes in Washington learned that the Trump administration had quietly felled hundreds of trees at the course, despite previously agreeing to notify her of any major alterations. The property, which is owned by the federal government, has become the latest site around Washington that President Trump has envisioned redeveloping into a legacy project.
Judge Reyes, a Biden appointee, had already ordered the cutting be paused — her new order on Tuesday extended that prohibition for another two weeks.
Late Friday, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing that the Interior Department was preparing to cut down more than 500 trees throughout the course, part of what the department said was a fulfillment of a 2019 historical restoration for the site.
Cutting began Saturday morning, and by the end of the day, crews had cleared at least 400 trees.
Two Washington residents and a preservationist organization sued in February over Mr. Trump’s plans to redevelop the affordable municipal course into a championship-level one.
In a heated hearing on Monday, Judge Reyes demanded to know who had directed lower-level officials in the National Park Service to begin cutting, and why the Justice Department had only disclosed the plan hours before cutting was scheduled to begin, late on the Friday of a holiday weekend.
Over four hours, she had a Justice Department lawyer place calls to increasingly senior officials up the chain of command in the Interior Department to identify who authorized the weekend clearing.
One Interior Department official who was summoned to testify identified two top agency officials as responsible for greenlighting the tree cutting, Gregory Wischer, a deputy chief of staff at the department, and Jessica Bowron, the acting director of the Park Service. After failing to reach Mr. Wischer on Monday, Judge Reyes ordered both he and Ms. Bowron appear on Oct. 19 to speak to how the last-minute plan unfolded.
She also ordered the Trump administration to give three days’ written notice before making any “irreparable modification to any permanent form or feature of the East Potomac Golf Course.”
In July, Judge Reyes had warned lawyers to keep the court updated about plans for the golf course, emphasizing during remarks from the bench that she would not tolerate an unannounced overhaul of the course, similar to the surprise demolition of the East Wing of the White House. She directed the Justice Department to notify the court if major changes were coming, so that a group suing to preserve the current municipal course could react.
During the hearing on Monday, she warned that if the administration cut trees down now in violation of her new orders, she would consider contempt proceedings. And she vowed to continue pressing for answers about whether the Justice Department concealed efforts to covertly start redesigning the course.
“The questions go to whether or not I’ve been lied to,” she said. “Whether I’ve been lied to in declarations about the plan, whether or not I’ve been lied to about the timing of things, and whether I’ve been lied to about what kind of notice the court was going to receive.”
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