Question: When the government tells a court that a board weighed a four-year phased renovation against a two-year closure, what happens if the board never saw the comparison?

Answer: It withdraws it. On Wednesday, October 21, the Justice Department filed a notice of errata in the Kennedy Center case conceding that portions of three sentences in its pending motion “mistakenly describe” the JLL plan, that the comparison of a two-year closure with “an alternative four-year project with phased, partial closures” and the $41 million construction-cost figure drawn from it came from “an alternate version of the report provided to the Center on August 20, 2026, which was not provided to the Board,” and that the report the Board had was 160 pages, not 180. “Defendants regret these errors.” Filed the same day, Representative Joyce Beatty’s reply in support of her motion to compel says the government produced that August report for the first time on Monday, October 19, after the depositions had ended, and that it shows a phased renovation was feasible. Discovery closed Friday.

The two filings are a pair, and the order in which to read them is the order in which they landed. The errata is three pages and concedes a factual error at the foundation of the government’s motion to dissolve the injunction. The reply is nineteen pages and argues that the error was not isolated, that documents have been produced only when a witness or a reporter forces the issue, and that the privilege asserted to stop the rest fails on three independent grounds. Together they put one question in front of Judge Christopher Cooper: what did the Board actually have when it voted, and who decided that?

The other two dockets were quiet in the way that matters less. The D.C. Circuit has now gone three weeks without an entry, and the stay motion has been fully briefed for twenty-five days. In the district court Epstein case the only filings came from a man who is not a party to it. Neither docket produced a ruling on anything that has been waiting since September.

The week’s filings

Five entries landed across the three dockets. Three are in the Kennedy Center case, on two days, and two are in the district court Epstein case. The D.C. Circuit saw nothing for the third consecutive week. The Kennedy Center filings carry the week: a sealed opposition on Monday, then the errata and the reply on the same day, Wednesday.

The errata is the document to read first, because it is an admission and because it is short. It identifies the first sentence of the second full paragraph of page 9 of the government’s consolidated memorandum, which described the JLL report as including “a comparison of the construction costs of a two year closure of the building and an alternative four-year project with phased, partial closures of the building,” and the final sentence of the first paragraph of page 32, which said that “JLL’s estimate that a phased closure of parts of the building would cost $41 million more than a temporary closure of the building—in construction costs alone—further supports this conclusion.” Neither description was of the report the Board received. Both came from a later version, and the government withdraws the remaining quoted language from its memorandum. The same notice corrects the report’s length from 180 pages to 160.

The reply is the argument that follows from that. It has five parts, and the first is a direct answer to the declaration this page treated last week as decisive. Joshua T. Hoyt, a Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Counsel to the President, wrote that “at the direction of the President” he “submits this declaration formally invoking the presidential communications privilege.” Beatty’s lawyers read that carefully and say it does not do the work: attesting that the President directed the submission of a declaration is not the same as stating that he directed the invocation of the privilege, and the declaration elsewhere says the declarant asserts it “on behalf of the Office of the President,” which is not the President personally. They cite United States v. Navarro, where a letter from an attorney to the President failed for the same reason.

Kennedy Center: Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC), D.D.C.

  • October 19: ECF 108, a sealed opposition filed by Beatty and docketed against the sealed motion at ECF 65, on the deadline ECF 99 set for her response to the proposed JLL Plan redactions. No copy is in the feed, so what it argues cannot be stated here.
  • October 21: ECF 109, the government’s Notice of Errata, three pages, withdrawing the phased-renovation comparison and the $41 million figure and correcting the report’s length.
  • October 21: ECF 110, Beatty’s reply in support of the motion to compel, nineteen pages, with Exhibit A.

Epstein files: Phang v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01417 (EGS), D.D.C.

  • October 22: ECF 60, a request for leave to file, in which a non-party, Eugene Gibbs-Squires, seeks leave to file a motion to clarify. The clerk’s reason line reads “Filer is not a party to the case.” No copy is in the feed.
  • October 23: ECF 61, a second request for leave from the same filer, for a motion for an order, with one exhibit. No copy is in the feed.

Epstein files appeal: Phang v. Blanche, D.C. Cir. No. 26-5299 (consolidated with 26-5334)

  • Nothing was filed in the window. The last entry remains the appellant’s reply of September 29.

The Kennedy Center: Beatty v. Trump

Where the case stands: Judge Cooper’s opinion of May 29 declared the board’s December 2025 renaming void and preliminarily enjoined the March 16 closure decision; his order of September 15 enjoined the August 13 inscription and the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza” renaming. The Board voted again to close the main building for two years, on August 13 and again on September 15, and moved to dissolve the injunction under Rule 60(b)(5) (ECF 88) and for partial summary judgment (ECF 89), arguing that the later votes rest on material the Board did not have in March. Discovery closed October 23. Beatty’s opposition to the motion to dissolve is due October 30, the government’s reply November 6, and briefing on summary judgment is stayed until the court rules on the lift motion. The building is still closed, and there is still no reopening date.

The government’s theory of the case is that the Board voted a second time with better information. That is what a Rule 60(b)(5) motion needs: a change in circumstances that makes continued enforcement of the injunction inequitable. The new information was said to be two expert products, a project-development plan from the real estate firm JLL and a cost-benefit analysis from Delta Consulting Group. The errata removes one load-bearing piece of that account. The comparison of a two-year closure against a four-year phased renovation was not in the June 8 plan presented to the Board before its August 13 meeting. It was in a version delivered to the Center a week later, on August 20, and the errata says in terms that this version “was not provided to the Board.” The Board’s vote on September 15 came after that date, and there is nothing in the notice to suggest the Board ever received the later report either.

Read the errata next to the reply, and the week acquires a shape. The reply says the August 20 report surfaced in discovery on October 19, four days before the close, a month after the government quoted it in a September brief. “It is therefore particularly inexplicable,” Beatty’s lawyers write, “why Defendants did not produce the lengthy JLL report until now, at the tail end of the extended discovery period.” The report, they say, confirms that a phased renovation was feasible, appears to contradict what the Board was told, and shows “how Defendants appear to have cherrypicked information from their own consultants to manufacture a case for shutdown and foreclose the Board’s consideration of prudent alternatives.”

One document the reply quotes does more work than its length suggests. In a production made during discovery, JLL was told by Center management that “Q3 2028 reopening is absolute; driven by Presidential mandate.” The reply sets that beside Floca’s testimony, recounted in its supplemental memorandum, that the Chairman chose the two-year period himself. The point is not that a chairman had a preference. It is that the preference arrived as a fixed constraint on the analysis on which the Board would later be asked to rely.

The legal argument is built to survive a loss on any one ground. On invocation, the reply says the declaration is ambiguous about the one thing Navarro requires. On particularity, it says the declaration lists the discovery requests to which privilege is asserted and nothing else: no count of documents, no subject matter, no authors, no dates, none of what a privilege log would carry. Rule 26(b)(5)(A) and Dellums v. Powell, it says, require that much in civil cases as much as criminal ones. On scope, it says the Center is not an Article II entity, that a party wearing dual hats bears the burden of proving a communication was made in the privileged role, and that the government has declined to attempt that showing. “Trump may confine himself to his ‘official’ duties as President,” the reply says, “or Trump may choose to take on extracurricular roles.” On need and waiver, it says the privilege fails even if it applies.

Whether any of that persuades Judge Cooper is now the question on which the case waits. The reply is the last word in the compel briefing, and ECF 103 said the court “will await completion of the briefing on executive privilege before addressing Plaintiff’s objections concerning that issue.” That briefing is complete. So is discovery. Nothing on the docket says when the court will rule, and the October 30 opposition will be written without knowing.

The sealed filing deserves a note, because it is the kind of entry a reader skips. ECF 108 was filed Monday, on the deadline the court gave Beatty to respond to the government’s proposed redactions to the JLL Plan. It is itself sealed. So the document on which the Board’s defense rests is still moving toward the public record, and the argument about how much of it the public may read is being made in a filing the public cannot read.

The Epstein files: Phang v. Blanche

Where the case stands: Judge Sullivan granted a preliminary injunction on June 25, holding that the Epstein Files Transparency Act required disclosure and that the Department had argued procedure instead of substance. On September 16 he granted Phang’s motion to compel an answer, denied the government’s motion to stay his deadlines, and set the administrative record: a certified list by October 1, the record to Phang by October 15. The government answered on September 24, nearly three months late, and appealed both orders; the two appeals are consolidated at the D.C. Circuit. On October 1 it filed ECF 51, asking the court to postpone the record until its Rule 12(c) motion was resolved, and ECF 52, the motion that would make the record unnecessary. On October 9 the court ordered redacted versions of the underlying handwritten FBI interview notes behind three FD-302 reports, and the government delivered them by hand on October 16.

This week the parties filed nothing, and that is the finding. The October 15 deadline for the administrative record passed with no entry recording production. The motion that would excuse it is undecided. So is the Rule 12(c) motion that would end the case, and so is Phang’s request to move her own response to it. The court has had the October 16 binder for eight days and has said nothing about it. A case that has moved nearly every week since June has stood still for one, and the stillness is entirely the court’s to end.

The two entries that did appear came from outside the case. A non-party, Eugene Gibbs-Squires, asked leave to file a motion to clarify and then, the next day, a motion for an order. The docket records the clerk’s reason for requiring leave: the filer is not a party. Nothing suggests the court has acted on either request, and neither touches the questions before Judge Sullivan. They are worth naming only because they are what a quiet docket looks like, and because a reader who checks the docket should know that the only movement came from outside the case.

The Epstein files on appeal

Where the appeal stands: the government moved on September 22 to stay the June 25 and September 16 orders and to expedite. A per curiam order of September 23, before Chief Judge Srinivasan and Judges Pillard and Pan, set Phang’s response for September 25 and any reply for September 29. Briefing is deferred pending further order, and dispositive motions in the consolidated appeals were due October 9.

This week the docket is empty for the third consecutive week. The stay motion has been fully briefed for twenty-five days. The October 9 deadline for dispositive motions is fifteen days past, with no entry recording compliance and none recording an extension. Nothing on the circuit’s docket says why, and this report will not guess at a reason.

What the silence is not is an administrative stay. This page corrected that misreading three weeks ago, and the correction still holds: a stay motion that has been briefed and not decided has not paused anything.

There is a symmetry worth naming, and it has sharpened since last week. In the district court the government complied with an order to produce notes while telling the court that its compliance was not a sample of what it would do at scale, and asked for a stay so that it could appeal before the notes moved. In the same week it conceded, in the other case, that it had quoted to a court a document that, by the plaintiff’s account, reached her only in the last days of discovery. On appeal it argues that the courts have no role in enforcing the statute. The through-line is not defiance of any single order. It is a preference for producing only what a court or a witness forces, one document at a time, and for asking that nothing move until an appeal has run.

What the coverage showed

Two accounts of the week could be retrieved and read, and each caught one half of it.

Raw Story, republished by DNYUZ, reported the errata on October 22 under the headline "‘Whoops!’ Trump lawyers caught erasing key Kennedy Center closure justification". The account is accurate on the documents: the errata, the two versions of the JLL report, the August 20 date, the 160-page and 180-page lengths, and the withdrawn $41 million figure. It does not carry the fact that ties the two filings together: the government had the August report in hand when it quoted it in September and produced it only on October 19.

The Washington Sun reported the reply on October 22 under the headline “Rep. Joyce Beatty Is Trying to Reveal Trump’s Kennedy Center Communications”. It gets the core of the privilege argument right: that the Center sits outside the executive branch, that the government has not identified the documents it withholds, and that it has not shown the President asserted the privilege for each one. It quotes the “hide the ball” line and the “Q3 2028 reopening is absolute; driven by Presidential mandate” document. It dates the filing to “Tuesday.” The filing’s own header reads Filed 10/21/26, which was a Wednesday.

Neither account mentions the sealed opposition, the close of discovery, the third empty week at the D.C. Circuit, or the two non-party filings in the Epstein case. That is not a complaint about two outlets working a fast story on deadline. It is the reason this page exists. The docket is where these cases are decided, and a week in which the government withdraws evidence from its own pending motion is a week the docket records in full and the coverage records in part.

What to watch next week

Friday, October 30. Beatty’s opposition to the motion to dissolve or vacate the preliminary injunction. It is the first filing in the case since discovery closed, it will be written with the August 20 report in hand, and it is the document that answers the government’s changed-circumstances argument on the merits.

Friday, November 6. The government’s reply in support of the motion to dissolve or vacate. After that the court can rule on whether the injunction stands.

Pending, any day. A ruling on the motion to compel, now fully briefed. A ruling on the proposed redactions to the JLL Plan, with Beatty’s sealed response filed Monday. In the district court in Phang, the three decisions that have waited since September: the motion to postpone the administrative record, the Rule 12(c) motion that would end the case, and Phang’s request to move her response to it. And at the D.C. Circuit, a ruling on the stay motion, twenty-five days after the last brief.

The thing to hold on to when reading next week’s version of this page: this week the government told a court that the report before the Board contained a comparison it did not contain, withdrew the claim, and conceded in the same breath that the version with the comparison was one the Board never received. The reply’s argument is that this was not an isolated slip but the method. The court has not yet said which it believes. What is no longer in dispute is the underlying fact: the comparison that was supposed to justify the closure was never in front of the people who voted for it.

Sources

  • Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC). CourtListener docket. Source of the filing list for the week, the docket description of the sealed entry at ECF 108 and of its relation to the sealed motion at ECF 65, and the absence of any ruling on the motion to compel, the sealing proposals, or the lift motion.
  • Declaration of Joshua T. Hoyt. (2026, October 14). Declaration of Joshua T. Hoyt, ECF 106-1. Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC) (D.D.C.). Source of the declarant’s name and title, “At the direction of the President, I submit this declaration formally invoking the presidential communications privilege”, “On behalf of the Office of the President”, and “I hereby assert presidential communications privilege”.
  • Plaintiff’s Reply in Support of Motion to Compel. (2026, October 21). Reply in Support of Motion to Compel, ECF 110. Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC) (D.D.C.). Source of “submits this declaration formally invoking the presidential communications privilege”, “on behalf of the Office of the President”, “It is therefore particularly inexplicable”, “how Defendants appear to have cherrypicked information from their own consultants to manufacture a case for shutdown and foreclose the Board’s consideration of prudent alternatives”, “Q3 2028 reopening is absolute; driven by Presidential mandate”, “Trump may confine himself to his ‘official’ duties as President”, “or Trump may choose to take on extracurricular roles”, and the account of the August 20, 2026 JLL report produced on October 19, 2026.
  • Defendants’ Notice of Errata. (2026, October 21). Notice of Errata, ECF 109. Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC) (D.D.C.). Source of “mistakenly describe”, “an alternative four-year project with phased, partial closures”, “JLL’s estimate that a phased closure of parts of the building would cost $41 million more than a temporary closure of the building—in construction costs alone—further supports this conclusion”, “an alternate version of the report provided to the Center on August 20, 2026, which was not provided to the Board”, the correction of “180-page” to “160-page”, and “Defendants regret these errors”.
  • Huffman, P. (2026, October 17). Docket Report: October 17, 2026. The carry-forward posture for all three dockets: the operative orders, the state of discovery, the revised briefing schedule, and the state of the appeal.
  • Order. (2026, October 7). Opinion and Order on the motions to seal and unseal, ECF 99. Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC) (D.D.C.). Source of the October 14 deadline for proposed redactions, the October 19 deadline for Beatty’s response, and the identification of ECF 65-1 as the JLL Plan.
  • Order. (2026, October 9). Order on Plaintiff’s Position Statement on discovery, ECF 103. Beatty v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-04480 (CRC) (D.D.C.). Source of “The Court will await completion of the briefing on executive privilege before addressing Plaintiff’s objections concerning that issue” and of the extension of discovery through October 23, 2026.
  • Phang v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01417 (EGS). CourtListener docket. Source of the filing list, the docket descriptions of ECF 60 and ECF 61 and the clerk’s reason line “Filer is not a party to the case”, and the absence of any order on ECF 51, ECF 52 or ECF 56.
  • Phang v. Blanche, Nos. 26-5299, 26-5334 (D.C. Cir.). CourtListener docket. Source of the entry list for the appeal, of the absence of any filing after September 29, and of the absence of any ruling on the stay motion.
  • Raw Story. (2026, October 22). "‘Whoops!’ Trump lawyers caught erasing key Kennedy Center closure justification". Coverage of the errata, cited here as coverage, with the record at ECF 109 and ECF 110.
  • The Washington Sun. (2026, October 22). “Rep. Joyce Beatty Is Trying to Reveal Trump’s Kennedy Center Communications”. Torrie Herrington. Coverage of the reply, cited here as coverage, with the record at ECF 110.

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