A federal judge in Washington has run out of patience with President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes opened a formal inquiry into whether government lawyers misled her court about the administration’s plans to close and redevelop the East Potomac Park golf course, a public course in the nation’s capital that has become the latest target of Trump’s push to reshape Washington’s historic landmarks and spaces.
“For months the court has trusted but not verified,” Reyes said from the bench. “No longer.”
What the judge is investigating
According to Politico, Reyes said the inquiry will focus on whether the administration acted in “bad faith” throughout the litigation and whether attorneys at the Justice Department and the Interior Department prompted witnesses to leave crucial information out of sworn statements to the court.
Bloomberg Law reported that the judge said she could run the inquiry herself or have it handled by a court-appointed special master, to determine whether Justice Department or agency lawyers made false statements, withheld information or otherwise broke ethics rules. She also ordered the administration to preserve every document and communication about the golf course planning process.
Reyes stressed that opening the inquiry does not mean she has found, or will find, that the government violated ethics rules.
“There is no plan to close the course”
The dispute centers on a simple question: when did the administration actually decide to shut the course down?
On Oct. 18, Trump announced that the Interior Department “has developed a plan” to build a new golf course on the East Potomac site and that the existing course “will be closed” on Nov. 15 for a renovation expected to take about 15 months.
The very next day, at an Oct. 19 hearing, Stanley Woodward, the Justice Department’s third-ranking official, told Reyes that “there is no plan to close the course.”
Then, on Wednesday, Oct. 28, the department filed a notice confirming that the golf course and surrounding areas will close on Nov. 15.
A two-hour grilling
Reyes questioned Woodward for more than two hours on Friday, Reuters reported, saying she was concerned that attorneys had provided “materially misleading information” and left out other relevant details about the administration’s plans.
She opened by reading him the professional rule on a lawyer’s duty of candor to the court, according to Law&Crime. When she pressed him on when a plan to close the course first existed, Woodward said the plan “was completed with the submission of our notice on October 28.”
Reyes then pointed to Trump’s Oct. 26 post saying the course would close “as scheduled” on Nov. 15. “You’re telling me, as the third highest ranking official at DOJ, to not believe what the president said on October 18th, and not to believe him on October 26th when he said as scheduled,” she said.
Asked what the president meant, Woodward replied, “I don’t know what the president meant, and if I did, I couldn’t talk about that,” citing executive privilege. Reyes called that “quite an extraordinary view of executive privilege.”
Hundreds of trees already gone
The case was brought by a conservation group seeking to block the renovation altogether. Earlier, Reyes required the government to give advance notice of any substantive construction work at the course. After the administration cut down hundreds of trees in the park in October without that notice, she issued a temporary order blocking further tree removal and warned that defiance could lead to contempt proceedings.
Trump has attacked Reyes in multiple social media posts over the case, Politico reported, and has said the course will close as scheduled on Nov. 15.
What comes next
The inquiry raises the stakes in a fight that began over a public golf course and has turned into a test of whether the administration has been straight with a federal court. With the Nov. 15 closure date just over two weeks away, the documents the government has now been ordered to preserve could show exactly when the plan came together, and whether the court was told the truth.