A federal judge took a sharp swipe at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth while rejecting the Trump administration’s bid to remove her from an unrelated case.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes made the remark in a footnote to a 13-page opinion filed Sunday denying a motion to disqualify her from a lawsuit over the administration’s tree-clearing at Washington’s East Potomac Golf Course, and she blew off complaints about her earlier jab at Hegseth’s busy schedule as simply “facts, not insults.”
In its recusal motion, the government tried to show that Reyes was biased against the executive branch by pointing to other cases on her docket. One complaint was that she had “ma[de] fun of” Hegseth and threatened to compel his deposition testimony in Talbott v. Trump, a challenge to the administration’s ban on transgender troops.
Reyes said neither was true.
She wrote that she had actually denied the plaintiffs’ request for a seven-hour deposition of Hegseth. She left open only the possibility of hearing arguments for a limited, one-hour session if they asked again.
At an Oct. 14 hearing, she had acknowledged that she was “very aware that he is the Secretary of Defense and has a lot of constraints on his time.” But she also noted that “he has time to tweet, and he has time to put out videos, and he has time to speak to the generals.”
“These are facts, not insults,” Reyes wrote.
The judge was just as unimpressed with the broader effort to use other cases against her. The government “identifies no authority suggesting that prior conduct in unrelated cases establishes deep-seated bias in the instant case,” she wrote. “Nor does it identify any prior conduct that establishes such bias.”
The administration had also accused Reyes of “histrionics” and of disrespecting officials’ “valuable time.” She answered with transcripts showing she had denied the golf course plaintiffs’ requests for relief nearly a dozen times before the government cut down nearly 430 healthy trees in a single day over a holiday weekend.
“It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion,” Reyes concluded. “But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record.”
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