Editor's Note: This story has been updated for clarity with additional timeline elements.
Over the past two weeks, a court battle over an island in the middle of the Potomac River has become a fight over the justice system itself. As a new hearing began on Friday, Judge Ana Reyes asked the Justice Department if there was anything they needed to "correct" on the record after they were caught ignoring the judge's previous orders.
The ordeal began on Oct. 12, the federal court brought the White House into court after it chopped down a large number of cherry blossom trees on Hains Point, where the public East Potomac Golf Course is, along with a biking and walking trail and other parks. The judge previously told the government in the months before that it had to notify the court before doing anything major to the island. Only routine maintenance was allowed.
On the Friday Oct. 9, at 4:55 p.m., President Donald Trump's administration told a federal judge it would cut down a number of trees previously protected by a court order. The New York Times reported that the administration planned to remove more than 500 trees. In the Oct 12 hearing, it was revealed that, 430 trees of those 500 had been cut down.
The judge was incensed. She said she had given the White House every ounce of good faith. She assumed that everything they said was trustworthy but that they abused that trust.
By Friday, Oct. 30, after a restraining order and intervention by the court that had taken several days, the judge opened the hearing by reading aloud Rule 3.3 of the Professional Conduct, which deals specifically with "candor to the tribunal."
According to courts and justice reporter Chris Geidner, who publishes the "Law Dork" Substack, Judge Reyes then asked Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr., "whether there were any material misrepresentations made by DOJ or DOI that he wants to correct."
Woodward answered, “Not to my knowledge.”
This hearing included the agency counsel for the Department of Interior, who was asked whether the secretary himself, Doug Burgum, been involved in the golf course plans.
The attorney replied, “There is a wide range of meanings” of “been involved."
Geidner implied that wasn't a smart answer to give. "He’s new to Reyes’s courtroom, I suspect," the reporter wrote on BlueSky. "This is not going well, folks."
As it turns out, Burgum has been in two meetings where the golf course was discussed. Woodward brought his own legal counsel so he could be sworn in. At issue recently has been that Trump has gone on a posting spree where he's made a number of accusations and declarations about the golf course that are in direct contrast to what is being said in court.
Several of the hearings have been about these and Friday's began with the same questions but about new posts.
