A federal judge temporarily barred the Interior Department on Monday from carrying out a variety of major alterations at East Potomac Park, finding that the government had been taking steps to initiate President Trump’s vision for championship level golf course on the property while passing off the work in court as routine maintenance.
The ruling followed an extraordinary confrontation between the Justice Department and Judge Ana C. Reyes, who throughout October called several Trump administration officials and government lawyers to account for what she described as misrepresentations about the plan.
The clash put a spotlight on what had been one of the president’s less visible plans for transforming the capital, compared to his efforts to seize control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, build a 250-foot triumphal arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery and add a gilded ballroom to the White House. This, instead, was the overhaul of a municipal golf course and public park.
It culminated in a searing 70-page opinion issued on Monday, in which Judge Reyes wrote that much of what she had been told in court stood at odds with Mr. Trump’s public pronouncements about the golf course, which came even as officials were insisting that no long-term plan was settled.
“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President,” she wrote. “Not to believe him that a cabinet secretary has ‘developed’ a federal land project. Not to believe him that the secretary’s agency will destroy a historic golf course already on the land.”
“And yet, here we are,” she added.
A group that included two Washington residents and a preservationsociety who sued to block an overhaul of the existing site had asked the court to prevent the administration from cutting down more trees after 400 were felled in one morning earlier this month.
Judge Reyes granted the request and went further, barring other actions that could indirectly destroy trees, including staging heavy machinery. She went to great lengths to impart her instructions in detail, an apparent attempt to prevent the administration from citing confusion or ambiguity to act without her involvement.
She required the government to notify the court at least 10 days before closing the course or making any “irreversible modification to any forms or features” to East Potomac Park, where the current course is, including changes to “the Park’s landforms, vegetation, course design, hydrology, pathways, and structures.”
“This is a big win that will rightly protect East Potomac Park from further irreparable harm,” said Skye Perryman, the president of the nonprofit Democracy Forward, which is representing the group behind the lawsuit.
The dramatic changes that Mr. Trump has made to Washington loomed over the lawsuit from the beginning.
Throughout early interactions with Justice Department attorneys on the case, Judge Reyes stressed that she wanted to avoid surprises, after the president acted without warning last year to to demolish the East Wing of the White House before courts could review the legality of the project.
At the same time, she said the lawsuit placed her in a difficult spot, because she did not view it as the role of federal courts to police minor decisions about management of federal lands. While Mr. Trump had mused since last year about transforming plans for East Potomac Park, earlier this year, she repeatedly told the group behind the lawsuit that it was not yet clear that the federal government was actively implementing his vision, making court action premature.
Hesitant to issue any order that would prevent rank-and-file government workers from carrying out everyday maintenance on the course, she prevailed on the Justice Department to provide early warning before workers started major work at the golf course.
During hearings in May and July, she told government lawyers she expected professionalism and that she would trust them to let her know when plans firmed up and if government was preparing begin work on the course Mr. Trump had described.
She stressed she would give the Justice Department “the benefit of the doubt” and that she was confident that workers would not “act first and ask forgiveness later.”
But in October, that calculus changed.
“The government then did precisely what plaintiffs feared,” she wrote in an opinion earlier this month.
On a Friday evening, headed into the Columbus Day weekend, the Justice Department filed an update advising that the Interior Department had crafted a plan to clear hundreds of trees across the course. The next morning, just hours later, the crews arrived and cut down hundreds of trees.
At that point, Judge Reyes lambasted the Justice Department, vowing to get answers about who authorized the cutting, whether it was in preparation for Mr. Trump’s renovation and how much time had passed between the decision to cut down the trees and the Justice Department’s filing alerting the court.
In two hearings, she ordered four Interior Department officials to recount how the decision was made. She sparred with Stanley Woodward Jr., the third most senior official at the Justice Department, who stepped in to represent the government.
In the meantime, Mr. Trump announced in several social media posts in October that work would begin “immediately” and the course would close in November to complete the project.
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