The motion was filed on October 16 by the Associate Attorney General of the United States, on behalf of the Department of the Interior, and it accused the presiding judge of “histrionics,” of questioning the intelligence of government attorneys, and of “open hostility” toward the Executive Branch. It asked her to disqualify herself from D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, No. 1:26-cv-00477, and it asked her to release the audio of a hearing so the public could hear her tone (Dkt. 86).

Two days later, Judge Ana C. Reyes answered. The answer is not the kind of document federal courts usually produce. It is a ledger: claim on the left, record on the right, every entry carrying a transcript citation. It opens by conceding the seriousness of the charge and then declines to argue about it in the abstract (Dkt. 95):

For months, the Court has declined Plaintiffs’ repeated requests to restrain the Government’s activities at East Potomac Golf Course. Time and again, it has credited Government counsel’s representations and refused to presume bad faith. The Government now seeks to disqualify the Court for bias. That is a serious charge. The Court answers it. With the record.

Then she does. To the claim that she has shown hostility toward government lawyers, she answers with her own words about the same lawyer, quoted at length from March, July and September: “I have 1,000 percent faith in you.” “I think you’ve been a terrific advocate for the Government.” “No government attorney has violated one of my orders.”

To the claim that she hamstrung the government from the outset, she answers with a count: before October 11, plaintiffs had asked the court for some form of relief about a dozen times, and the court had denied every request.

And to the implicit claim that her conduct on October 12 came from nowhere, she answers with the sequence that produced it:

So what happened? Not sudden onset bias. Instead, the Government decided to remove over 500 healthy, non-invasive trees from East Potomac Golf Course. It waited until 4:55 p.m. on the Friday of a holiday weekend to give notice that it would begin removing trees within 15 hours. It removed nearly 430 trees in one day and would have destroyed hundreds more but for a rain delay.

The order closes on a sentence that will outlast the case. “It is easy to weaponize selective quotations to bring a baseless recusal motion. But it is much harder to meet the demanding legal standard against a full record.”

What the finding actually was

The recusal order is the memorable document. The finding it defends is the consequential one, and it is not a mood. It is a set of named credibility determinations in the seventy-page opinion of October 26, one per witness (Dkt. 103).

WitnessPositionFinding
Kevin GriessNPS superintendent, National Mall and Memorial Parks“The Court finds Griess credible.”
Frank LandsNPS deputy director for operations“The Court also finds Lands credible.”
Gregory WischerInterior deputy chief of staff for policy“The Court does not find Wischer credible.”
Jessica BowronNPS comptroller, exercising delegated director authorityTestimony credible; her October declaration “misleading”

Of Wischer, the political appointee who told Lands to implement the tree plan “as soon as practical,” the court wrote:

Wischer toured the East Potomac Golf Course with the President, Secretary Burgum, and Tom and Gavin Fazio while carrying various Fazio-designed “concepts” for its redesign. A tour after which President Trump posted that redesign work would begin on September 1. Yet Wischer maintains that he, as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary of the Interior, just spontaneously became interested in tree and vegetation management. In mid-September. At the East Potomac Golf Course.

The Bowron finding is the one that matters most, because it is arithmetic. She signed a declaration on October 6 at 5:15 p.m. Twenty-four minutes later she emailed her edits to the tree management plan to park and regional staff. The declaration described ongoing routine maintenance and said nothing about the plan. The court’s conclusion:

Given that timeline, the omission of the TMP is not just conspicuous—it is misleading.

Then the sentence that points past the client and at the lawyers. The court declined to fault Bowron, who testified that she relied on counsel’s advice. “Counsel must have known that the TMP was a material development that should have been included in any declaration attesting to NPS’s plans on the course.”

The word she used in the hearing

The October 12 hearing is where the government’s credibility became an issue, and the provocation is documented. Notice went out at 4:55 p.m. on Friday, October 9. Cutting began the next morning. By the end of the day roughly 430 healthy, non-invasive trees were down. The government’s own witnesses could supply no urgency: Griess testified that the trees could come down tomorrow or in a month with no difference from the agency’s standpoint, and Lands could give no reason for the haste.

The court’s account of what it said, restated in the recusal order at page 8, is that the Government “had lost ‘all of its credibility in this case.’” Press accounts of the live hearing render the line as “what has happened has cost the government all of its credibility with me in this case.” The audio from that hearing is sealed, and the government’s motion asked that it be released, so the citable form is the judge’s own restatement.

What makes that a finding rather than an outburst is the sentence after it. A reasonable person, she wrote, “would understand that the Court’s skepticism about whether Government counsel can act in good faith going forward is legitimate and not the product of bias.”

What she did not say

Precision matters here, because the strong version of this story is the false one.

She did not find that any lawyer lied under oath. She credited Griess and Lands outright. She found Bowron’s testimony credible and expressly declined to fault her. She reprinted her own praise of government counsel at such length that the recusal motion reads, in retrospect, as an argument she was able to answer with her own prior sentences. Her finding is narrower: that in this case, on these facts, the account the government gave could not be relied upon, and that the people who wrote the declaration in which that account appeared had reason to know better.

She also did not treat the loss of confidence as a permanent state. The point of the recusal order is that the confidence was spent, not that it never existed.

The government supplied the proof

Three days later, the question the court had been circling became a filing.

On October 19, according to the court’s minute order of October 27, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward told the court that “with regard to the November 15th date… there is no plan to close the course.” At 11:37 p.m. on October 26, the President posted that the course would close on November 15 as scheduled. The court took judicial notice, ordered the government to say whether a plan existed, to explain how that could “be reconciled with Associate AG Woodward’s representation to the Court,” and to send Woodward to a hearing in person.

The answer came on the afternoon of October 28 (Dkt. 107):

The undersigned acknowledges the President has twice directed Interior and the National Park Service to close the park by November 15. Accordingly, Interior, acting through counsel, is working to develop a plan to implement that direction.

There was no plan. There is a plan under development. Both statements were made to the same judge within nine days, by the same office, about the same park.

The same filing argued that no preservation order was needed, and in doing so quoted the judge back at herself: the only reason she had not entered a show cause on contempt, she had said, “is that I never put this in a formal order.” That was true on October 12. On October 26 she entered one, and the order requires ten business days’ written notice before any closure or irreversible change, with a sworn declaration required for any public-safety exception.

At 9:59 that night, the government filed the notice the injunction required (Dkt. 111). The National Park Service will submit a Tom Fazio rendering to the National Capital Planning Commission on Friday, October 30. It will close East Potomac Park south of Buckeye Drive and the golf course on November 15, “consistent with the President’s directive.” It has signed a new lease with National Links Trust under which that operator stops running the course on or before that date. The notice also cites a crumbling sea wall as a safety hazard requiring the closure regardless of any redesign.

Friday

The hearing is set for 10:00 a.m. on October 30, in person, with Woodward ordered to attend and with at least one Interior solicitor having prior experience on the case also required to appear. The court has given the government three questions to answer aloud: whether it still maintains that there is no final agency action; the dates and times at which the President twice directed the closure; and the first date on which Interior, acting through counsel, began working to develop a plan to implement that direction.

The government has also appealed. The notice is docketed and the appeal is No. 26-5374 in the D.C. Circuit. No motion for a stay appears on the district court docket, so as of the last filing the injunction remains in force while the appeal proceeds.

Why a golf course

An injunction is a prediction. It says that a plaintiff will probably win, that the harm will be irreparable, and that the defendant can be held to a line until a trial settles the matter. Every part of that rests on the assumption that the party across the table will do what it says.

Judge Reyes made the point in the opinion itself, in the sentence that explains why a judge who had refused to intervene for months finally did: “The Court acts now only because the Government did what it assured all it would not do.”

She had spent that credit deliberately. In July she told the parties she wanted to trust that people act in good faith, and that counsel had given her no reason to doubt it. In September she said she had no reason to disbelieve the government’s account of the tree removals. She declined an injunction for the stated reason that she did not want to put anyone through contempt proceedings. On October 26 she wrote that the court still does not speak for the trees, only for the rule of law.

A credibility finding is not a verdict on a person’s soul, and this one is not written as though it were. It is a ledger of what the court was told, when, and by whom, set against what the court could verify. The entries are dated. That is the whole method, and it is why the document will be read long after the trees are replaced by whatever replaces them.

Sources

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman