DOJ Lawyers Will Show Up For The Golf Course Case But Signing The Brief Is Another Matter Entirely

Monday’s marathon hearing over the East Potomac Golf Course had plenty of news in it. Two administration officials testified they knew nothing about the championship course the president has been posting about. A federal judge disclosed she’s getting death threats over a public golf course. The Federalist Papers came up in a dispute about tree removal. But the moment that set off the right-wing echo chamber came first thing in the morning, when U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes asked which Justice Department lawyers would be willing to put their names on the government’s latest brief.

Nobody in the room was allowed to answer.

The filing in question landed Sunday night with exactly one signature, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward. Woodward is DOJ’s No. 3, the official who parachuted into the case last week to demand Reyes recuse herself and lost that fight in about 48 hours, right before the president logged on to call her a “crazed lunatic”. The brief insists “there is no final agency action here.” The president has announced the course will close November 15 and that work would start “IMMEDIATELY!”, but the brief explains that, just as redesigning “all the art exhibits in a Smithsonian Museum would not be agency action, neither would a decision to redesign a golf course, or to trim trees, replace fences, expand the fairways, or mow the lawn.” It also informs the court that “Defendants did not portend to represent the actual position or mental impressions of the President in arguing that no final agency action had occurred.”

Portend? A second set of eyes might have helped there.

So Reyes ordered the government to refile it with the signatures of any DOJ attorneys on the case who were willing to sign. Then she turned to counsel’s table and asked for a show of hands. According to Lawfare’s Roger Parloff’s live coverage, it went like this:

REYES: Right now, for Rule 11 purposes, which other attys willing to sign this brief
WOODWARD: I’m going to instruct attys not to [answer].
REYES: I’m ordering you all to come to the podium and sign it. I’m giving them a direct order.

Woodward said that naming them would put the career lawyers in an “incredibly untenable” position. Which is… an interesting thing to say about your own brief.

By the afternoon, Reyes had backed off. “Having spoken with my clerks and thought about it a little bit more, I am going to withdraw the request that DOJ refile yesterday’s brief and that I get identification as to who signed,” she said. But she didn’t pretend the problem had gone away. According to Parloff’s report, she told the government that when the department files briefs, the attorneys in the case should put their names on them, and if they don’t, she doesn’t have confidence in them.

Cue the outrage. “Biden judge walks back order against Trump DOJ” ran the Washington Examiner’s headline. Over at RedState, the gotcha was that Rule 11 doesn’t require every attorney on a case to sign every filing.

Which is true! Rule 11(a) requires a signature from one attorney of record, Woodward is one. The paperwork is in order.

But that was never quite the point. As my colleague Joe Patrice put it on X:

If a lawyer is willing to show up to the courtroom yet unwilling to say they’d sign the brief that’s a huge deal actually.

These aren’t interns. If you’re at the DOJ and unwilling to put your name on something for Rule 11 purposes… yikes.

And this isn’t just ATL being ATL. Even an ASSLaw prof sees the logic.

It’s the career lawyers sitting at that table who have been in this case for months, the ones who told Reyes there were no concrete plans for Trump’s overhaul, the ones who promised her notice before anything irreversible happened, right before the Park Service took a chainsaw to hundreds of trees over Columbus Day weekend. Now they’re being asked to vouch that the president’s posts don’t mean what they plainly say, and that tearing up a historic public course is the legal equivalent of mowing the lawn. If those lawyers can’t certify that, that tells you something. A political appointee being the only one who’ll sign tells you something else.

The rest of the day didn’t help the government’s case. Acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron and Interior Department Deputy Chief of Staff Greg Wischer testified that they knew nothing about plans for a new course, and that the trees came down under a 2019 landscape plan that predates all of this. Reyes was not persuaded. “Do I believe the president of the United States or do I believe you?” she asked. When DOJ lawyers argued that Trump couldn’t be checked by the judiciary, she pointed them to the Federalists’ line about ambition checking ambition. She also told them she’s been receiving death threats over this case… over a golf course.

The TRO runs through October 26, and Reyes signaled she’s likely to extend it. But don’t worry, the matter is still a personal hobby horse of the president. Overnight, Trump posted images of what he’s now calling “Trash Island” and told the judge to “study” them. Deepest of sighs.

Earlier: Golf Course Plaintiffs Give Judge Reyes A Heads-Up: The President Called You Insane Before Breakfast
DOJ Demands Judge Recuse Herself For Inappropriate Noticing They Broke The Law
‘You Did Your Absolute Worst’: Judge Delivers Epic Benchslap Over Trump Golf Course Chainsaw Spree