A Biden-appointed federal judge with a record of sharp clashes against the Trump administration berated Justice Department lawyers over tree cutting at a Washington golf course and told them they had lost credibility.
Judge Ana Reyes opened an emergency hearing Monday on the removal of hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Links in Hains Point, a historic public course on national parkland in Washington, D.C. Government counsel acknowledged that roughly 430 trees had already come down after work began over the weekend.
Fox News reported that Reyes tore into administration attorneys for giving the court and the plaintiffs almost no warning before the cutting started. Journalist Scott MacFarlane, who live-tweeted the hearing, said he had never heard a judge “scream at full-voice at a lawyer before.”
The episode fits a longer pattern. Reyes, nominated by President Biden in 2023, has repeatedly tangled with Trump officials in high-profile cases. This time the fight landed on a public golf facility the president wants upgraded into a championship-caliber course.
Reyes focused on timing. She said the court and the plaintiffs learned of the operation only at the edge of a holiday weekend, then watched the work begin the next day.
She told counsel:
"At 4:55pm on a Friday of a holiday weekend, the plaintiffs and I get [little] notice that hundreds of trees are going to be chopped down,"
She pressed the lawyers on basic contact.
"Do you have email or a cell phone?"
And she delivered the line that framed the hearing:
"You've lost credibility!"
A government lawyer told the court counsel had learned of the operation around Oct. 8 or 9 and was still waiting on fuller details. By Monday, the damage on the ground was already large: about 430 trees gone. Separate coverage in Britain put her rebuke of federal counsel at roughly 15 minutes.
Before the Monday session, Reyes had already moved to freeze further cutting. The Washington Examiner reported that the District of Columbia judge issued a minute order stopping the Trump administration from removing any more trees at the course until Tuesday at 7 a.m., ahead of a 10 a.m. hearing. The National Park Service had started the work on Saturday.
The administration’s public position is straightforward. Officials say the tree work carries out a 2019 National Park Service landscape-restoration plan, issued years before Trump floated a major redesign, and that the removals are authorized park management, not a stealth construction project.
Trump has been clear about his aim. He wants East Potomac Golf Links turned into a championship-level facility on the model of courses he has been associated with in the United States, Ireland, and Scotland. The course sits on an island of parkland tied to the city by the Jefferson Memorial area and the Francis Case Bridge on its western edge. Preservationists argue environmental and historic-preservation rules were not met before the cutting began.
That dispute is now in federal court in an emergency posture. Former Obama ethics lawyer Norm Eisen, working through the Democracy Defenders Fund, a group whose mission has been described as engineering broad legal resistance to the president, posted a victory-lap message Monday after the court agreed to take the matter up on an emergency basis.
Reyes is not new to Trump-world litigation. Trump’s Justice Department previously filed a formal misconduct complaint against her over alleged bias, including claimed ties to the Biden-era department and her handling of religious-belief questioning in court.
In earlier transgender military service litigation, she pressed a Trump administration attorney with a pointed hypothetical about Christian teaching. Then-DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle’s complaint described her asking how Jesus Christ would respond to “telling a group of people that they are so worthless, so worthless that we’re not going to allow them into homeless shelters?” She also labeled one order “biologically inaccurate,” language later noted by the Washington Post.
In 2025, Reyes ruled that Trump violated federal notice requirements when he fired several inspectors general, then declined to put those officials back in place, Reuters reported. The tree case now adds another public collision, this one over parkland, process, and how much warning a court is owed before irreversible work begins.
Open questions remain thick. The full case caption and docket details were not laid out in the initial accounts. Named plaintiffs and the individual government attorneys at the podium were not clearly identified in the early reporting. It is also unclear from those accounts exactly how far the 2019 Park Service restoration plan goes, and where Trump’s championship redesign begins, as a matter of the underlying documents.
What is clear is the sequence the judge hammered: late Friday notice, Saturday cutting, Monday emergency court, hundreds of trees already down, and a temporary judicial brake on more removal into Tuesday morning. Reyes framed the notice failure as a credibility problem for the lawyers standing in front of her. The administration framed the work as old Park Service landscape management finally being carried out.
Taxpayers own the land. Golfers use the course. Park rules and historic-preservation statutes are supposed to channel major changes through public process, not surprise weekend clearing. A federal judge who has made a habit of high-heat confrontations with this administration chose the credibility line in open court. The trees cannot be put back. The legal fight over what comes next at East Potomac is only getting started.
When a court has to learn about chainsaws on national parkland from a 4:55 p.m. Friday email, the public is right to ask who is running the process, and who is being told only after the damage is done.
