“I am thoroughly unamused right now,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said to Justice Department lawyers on Oct. 12. “I do not know how I could have made it any plainer.”
She was referring to the Trump administration’s efforts to bulldoze — both metaphorically and literally — its way toward remaking a public golf course in Washington, D.C. The story may seem relatively inconsequential — a single patch of land. But it shows just how much contempt Donald Trump and those in his employ have for the idea that rules or laws ought to apply to them.
For months, the administration has been planning to demolish much of East Potomac Golf Links and replace it with a course more to Trump’s liking. After a preservationist group and two golfers sued to block the plan earlier this year, Reyes told the government that they had to give advance notice before any substantial work was done on the site. Yet over the long holiday weekend, workers cut down more than 400 trees in the park. In a lame attempt at complying with her instructions, the government’s lawyers sent an email at 4:55 p.m. on the Friday before the holiday weekend mentioning that trees were going to be cut down.
As any lawyer will testify, judges really don’t like it when lawyers lie to them, attempt to deceive them or defy their orders. Yet that is what lawyers working for the Trump administration have done in case after case.
Reyes was furious. When a Justice Department attorney said the administration’s lawyers “did our best” to update her on work at the course, Reyes replied, “No, you did not do your best. You did your absolute worst.” After scolding the government’s lawyers, Reyes issued an injunction halting work on the site for two weeks. In response, the government demanded that she recuse herself from the case, saying she was biased against them. She denied their request.
Undeterred, on Sunday, Trump said on Truth Social that “Restoration work will begin…on November 15th, when the old Course will be closed to play.” On early Monday morning, he posted again about the subject, saying, “The judge on the case is a crazed lunatic whose courthouse tapes will reveal, may be insane?” He added that “The experts at ‘Interior’ are allowed to do this First Class renovation ‘as of right.’ They do not need an approval. Work is scheduled to begin IMMEDIATELY!”
At another hearing, hours after the president’s post, the government tried to claim that the tree removal wasn’t actually about preparing for Trump’s new golf course at all, but was about enacting a maintenance plan the government wrote in 2019. Reyes was incredulous at that assertion. “There is no universe in which all of this just coincidentally happens at the same time,” she said. “There just isn’t.”
As any lawyer will testify, judges really don’t like it when lawyers lie to them, attempt to deceive them or defy their orders. Yet that is what lawyers working for the Trump administration have done in case after case. An analysis by Just Security located 34 cases in which judges expressed their concern that the administration was not complying with legal orders, and another 90 cases in which judges said they could not trust what administration lawyers told them. That excludes immigration cases, where abuses have been far worse. The researchers found at least 740 immigration cases in which the administration failed to comply with legal orders. And, it should be noted, this analysis only went through March of this year.
Merely restoring legal professionalism at the DOJ will be insufficient. Wholesale firings must be just the start.
All that misconduct has occurred at a time when the Trump administration has completely discarded the principle — which had held since Watergate — that the Department of Justice should be independent of the president, making its decisions on prosecutions and law enforcement based on the law, not the preferences and grudges of the person in the Oval Office. This DOJ, on the other hand — led by Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche — investigates and prosecutes Trump’s critics like James Comey and Rep. Ilhan Omar, while Blanche campaigns for Republicans like just another political hack.
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s deeply misguided ruling in Trump v. U.S., it may be impossible to hold the president accountable for the deep corruption he has brought to the DOJ. But the officials who have carried out his attack on the rule of law have no such immunity. So when Democrats take full control of government — perhaps after the 2028 election — merely restoring legal professionalism at the DOJ will be insufficient. Wholesale firings must be just the start. There must also be investigations by Congress and sanctions against anyone who violated ethical standards. Those who participated in abuses must be punished just like any wrongdoer.
Since lawyers are licensed at the state level, that is where much of the action will take place. There must be consequences for anyone who engaged in misconduct — up to and including disbarment. It has happened in the recent past: Some of the most unethical lawyers who helped Trump try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election were disbarred in various states for their misdeeds, most notably Rudy Giuliani.
As law professor and legal ethics expert James Schultz wrote last year, “Baseless claims of election fraud, retaliatory lawsuits against the press and prosecutions advanced on tenuous grounds all stand as textbook violations” of legal ethics rules. As a consequence, “State boards should go after the attorneys who are enabling Trump’s behavior.” And that should be just the beginning.
The post How Trump’s golf course renovation turned into an attack on the rule of law appeared first on MS NOW.
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