“There is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happened at the same time. There just isn’t.”
That was U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes on Monday, after two senior Interior Department officials spent hours in her courtroom explaining why the National Park Service felled hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links over the Columbus Day weekend. She said the record showed “a strong showing of bad faith,” signaled she would extend the freeze on cutting indefinitely, and said any further work on the course would need three days of advance notice. The coverage has fixed on the insults flying in both directions. The more useful thing is the calendar, because the dates are what the judge is actually ruling on, and they read differently laid end to end.
Ten Days, Read Off the Docket
We built this from the court record, the government’s own notices and the president’s posts.
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| June 28 | Trump tours the course with golf architects Tom and Gavin Fazio |
| Friday, Oct. 9, 4:55 p.m. | Government notifies the court it will remove “up to 529 trees,” starting the next morning, before a holiday weekend |
| Saturday, Oct. 10 | Crews fell nearly 430 trees in a single day, within 15 hours of the notice |
| Tuesday, Oct. 13 | Reyes issues a temporary restraining order running through Oct. 26 |
| Friday, Oct. 16 | The Justice Department moves to disqualify Reyes, citing “bias” and “histrionics” |
| Sunday, Oct. 18 | Reyes denies the motion as “baseless”; Trump posts that the course closes Nov. 15 for a Tom Fazio redesign |
| Monday, Oct. 19, morning | Trump posts that work “is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY” and calls the lawsuit “ridiculous” |
| Monday, Oct. 19, in court | Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward tells the judge “there is no plan to close the course” |
The government’s position is that the cutting had nothing to do with the president’s redesign. Interior deputy chief of staff Gregory Wischer testified the crews were “cleaning up the course” under a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report that recommended removing dead, dying and hazardous trees. Reyes noted that in seven years the only part of that report anyone executed was the chainsaw part, and that it got executed in the ten days after the president’s allies started sending renderings around. Wischer acknowledged on the stand that those renderings reached his personal phone from people outside the government who are working on the plan.
The President and His Lawyers Told Two Different Stories on the Same Day
Acting Park Service Director Jessica Bowron testified that she learned of the November 15 closure the way everyone else did, from the president’s post, and that she had no information on the plan he described. Wischer said he was “not aware” of any work set to begin that day. Hours earlier the president had said the opposite in capital letters. Reyes put the problem plainly: “So who do I believe, the president of the United States, or do I believe you?”
Her answer, from the bench: “We did not go from zero to ‘work is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY’ in 60 seconds.”
The recusal fight fits the same pattern. The department filed to remove Reyes on Friday, three days after she stopped the cutting. She rejected it on Sunday, writing that “it is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion.” On Monday the president called her a “crazed lunatic” to reporters. She told the courtroom she has received death threats over the case and said, “I really don’t think that’s what the founders envisioned.”
What LNC Covered Last Week, and What Changed
The weekend of chainsaws was the subject of our piece on the taxpayer-funded ads that aired the same weekend. What changed Monday is that the government’s explanation was tested under oath and did not hold. Its own witnesses could not connect the 2019 report to the timing, could not account for the president’s closure date, and could not say who inside Interior had approved a plan the president says is final.
Our View: This Is Not a Dispute About Trees
East Potomac has been a public course since 1920, on land Congress set aside in 1897, and the plaintiffs’ case is that a Fazio championship redesign prices out the people the park was built for. The administration’s conduct in court tells you how it expects that argument to go. You do not file at 4:55 on a Friday before a holiday and start cutting at dawn if you believe you will win on the merits. You do that because a tree, once down, is not coming back, and a judge cannot restore it.
We think Reyes should issue the preliminary injunction, hold the government to written notice for every shovel, and refer the Friday-night filing for sanctions. Congress has not authorized this project, the Park Service’s own acting director was not told about it, and the president announced it on social media while his lawyers denied it in court. That is not a renovation. That is a government trying to outrun a judge, and so far it has cost the course about 500 trees and the government its credibility with the one person who gets to decide what happens next.