A federal judge on Monday temporarily barred the Interior Department from making various major changes to East Potomac Park, ruling that the government had taken steps to initiate President Trump’s vision of a championship-level golf course on the property while taking the work through court for routine maintenance.
The ruling follows a showdown between the Justice Department and Judge Ana C. Reyes, who throughout October called several Trump administration officials and government lawyers to answer for what she described as false statements about the plan.
The clash highlighted what had been one of the president’s less visible capital transformation projects, compared with his efforts to take control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and add a gilded ballroom to the White House. Rather, it involved renovating a municipal golf course and a public park.
That culminated in a poignant 70-page opinion released Monday, in which Judge Reyes wrote that much of what she was told in court was at odds with Mr. Trump’s public statements on the golf course, which came even as officials insisted no long-term plans were settled.
“Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting president,” she wrote. “Don’t believe it that a cabinet secretary has ‘developed’ a federal land project. Don’t believe it that the secretary’s agency will destroy a historic golf course already on the land.”
“And yet here we are,” she added.
Mr. Trump denounced the decision on social media Monday evening, saying the course would be closed as planned. He vowed to “immediately appeal” the decision.
“The judge has absolutely no right to block this very important and beautiful project,” he wrote. “We are asking the DC Circuit Court for immediate relief.”
Judge Reyes expressed surprise that a local dispute over a golf course had escalated into a broader examination of the Trump administration’s tactics, forcing the justices to anticipate when and where the federal government might act abruptly to carry out the president’s personal goals and plans.
“This now requires the court to reconcile President Donald J. Trump’s assertions with the sworn testimony of several government employees and the arguments of the Justice Department’s top lawyers,” she wrote. “This jumble of differing testimony concerns the future of the East Potomac Golf Course, a historic landmark.”
A group including two Washington residents and a preservation society who sued to block a redesign of the existing site had asked the court to block the administration from cutting down more trees after 400 were felled in one morning earlier this month.
Judge Reyes granted the request and went further, prohibiting other actions that could indirectly destroy trees, including the installation of heavy machinery. She went to great lengths to communicate her instructions in detail, an apparent attempt to prevent the administration from citing confusion or ambiguity to act without her input.
She asked the government to notify the court at least 10 days before closing the course or making any “irreversible changes to any form or feature” of East Potomac Park, where the current course is located, including changes to “park terrain, vegetation, course design, hydrology, trails and structures.”
“This is a major victory that will rightly protect East Potomac Park from further irreparable harm,” said Skye Perryman, president of the nonprofit Democracy Forward, which represents the group that brought the lawsuit.
Mr. Trump’s dramatic changes to Washington weighed on the trial from the start.
In early interactions with Justice Department lawyers on the case, Judge Reyes stressed that she wanted to avoid surprises, after the president acted without warning last year to demolish the East Wing of the White House before the courts could review the legality of the project.
At the same time, she said the lawsuit put her in a difficult position because she did not see the federal courts’ role as reviewing minor decisions regarding the management of federal lands. While Mr. Trump has been considering plans to transform East Potomac Park since last year. But earlier this year, Judge Reyes repeatedly told the group behind the lawsuit that it was not yet clear whether the federal government was implementing his vision, making legal action premature.
Hesitant to issue an order that would prevent rank-and-file officials from performing daily maintenance on the course, she asked the Justice Department to provide early warning before workers begin major work on the golf course.
Judge Reyes emphasized Monday that she maintains this approach and has not tied the government’s hands any more than necessary.
“The events surrounding this case have become extraordinary,” she wrote. “The legal result is not.”
At hearings in May and July, she told government lawyers that she expected professionalism and would trust them to let her know when the plans would come to fruition and whether the government was preparing to begin working on the path outlined by Mr. Trump.
She stressed that she would give the Justice Department “the benefit of the doubt” and that she was confident that workers would “not act first and ask for forgiveness later.”
But in October, that calculus changed.
“The government then did precisely what plaintiffs feared,” she wrote in an opinion earlier this month.
On a Friday evening, as Columbus Day weekend approached, the Justice Department filed an update saying the Interior Department had developed a plan to remove hundreds of trees on the route. The next morning, a few hours later, crews arrived and shot them dead.
At that point, Judge Reyes chastised the Justice Department, vowing to get answers about who authorized the felling, whether it was in preparation for Mr. Trump’s renovation and how much time had passed between the decision to cut down the trees and the Justice Department’s filing alerting the court.
In two hearings, she ordered four Interior Ministry officials to recount how the decision was made. She sparred with Stanley Woodward Jr., the Justice Department’s third-highest official, who stepped in to represent the government.
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump announced in several social media posts in October that work would begin “immediately” and that the course would end in November to complete the project.
In her opinion released Monday, Judge Reyes wrote that she found the testimony of most relatively junior officials at the Interior Department credible. But she wrote that Gregory Wischer, a Trump appointee and deputy chief of staff to Doug Burgum, the Interior secretary, did not appear to have honestly revealed what he knew about the tree-cutting project.
She noted that Mr. Wischer was photographed carrying the course design plans while touring the grounds with Mr. Trump and Mr. Burgum in June. She expressed doubt that he “had a spontaneous interest in tree and vegetation management”, as he appeared to suggest when describing to the court his role in managing the course.
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