A federal judge on Sunday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to disqualify her from a lawsuit over East Potomac Golf Course, turning the government’s own courtroom record against it.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes denied the motion in a blistering 13-page opinion.
“The Government now seeks to disqualify the Court for bias,” she wrote. “That is a serious charge. The Court answers it. With the record.”
The administration accused Reyes of “histrionics,” hostility toward its attorneys and favoritism toward the plaintiffs, led by the DC Preservation League. Reyes answered each claim with transcripts from past hearings.
In a footnote, Reyes noted that “histrionic” comes from the Latin word for actor, writing that she was “reminded of Hamlet’s advice to the players: ‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.’”
The suit challenges the administration’s work on the historic public course in Washington. President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that the work would begin Sept. 1.
Reyes noted that before October, the plaintiffs had asked her for some form of relief nearly a dozen times, and she denied every request. From February until Oct. 11, she never barred the government from taking any action at the course, including cutting down trees. She also repeatedly praised the government’s lawyer, at one point calling a filing “one of the more exceptional government briefs I have seen in three years on the bench.”
“So what happened?” Reyes wrote. “Not sudden onset bias.”
Instead, she said, the government decided to remove more than 500 healthy trees from the course. At 4:55 p.m. on the Friday of a holiday weekend, it gave notice that removal would begin within 15 hours. It then cut down nearly 430 trees in a single day, and only a rain delay stopped it from destroying hundreds more.
Reyes granted a temporary restraining order after an Oct. 12 hearing, where she said she was “furious” and that the government had lost “all of its credibility in this case.” She waved off the government’s complaints about her tone, citing appellate precedent that judges “must sometimes take strong actions and use strong words.”
She also dismissed the government’s grievance over being hauled into court on a federal holiday.
“The Government created an emergent situation,” she wrote. “The Court responded.”
Reyes closed with a rebuke: “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.”