In an unusually biting court filing that mimicked the classic tone of President Donald Trump, the Justice Department asked a federal judge late Monday to undo a ruling that would have halted construction of a massive new White House ballroom.
The DOJ’s request argued the suspected gunman who showed up at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner “confirms” that the injunction issued by US District Judge Richard Leon “is intolerable and unsustainable.”
The sharply worded filing represents the Trump administration’s latest bid to get out from under a protracted legal battle brought by the nation’s top historic preservation group against the ballroom project, which has resulted in several key rulings from Leon that say Trump cannot proceed with the project until Congress expressly authorizes it.
The latest eight-page filing signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stan Woodward is dotted with language that has become commonplace in the president’s social media.
“The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE because when they add the words ‘in the United States’ to the National Trust for Historic Preservation it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not,” the filing begins.
Though Leon’s decisions have been put on hold by a federal appeals court, lawyers for Trump over the weekend demanded the National Trust for Historic Preservation drop its case against the ballroom, which the group is refusing to do. In response, the administration turned to Leon to ask him to rescind a ruling earlier this month that said workers could not move forward with any above-ground construction of the ballroom but could proceed with finishing a highly sophisticated bunker being built under the site of the former East Wing.
The filing, which was not signed by any career lawyers at the department, claims the underlying case is “frivolous,” though Leon has never made such a finding in the matter. It criticizes the Trust as having “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and asks why anyone would object to the project given the fact that it’s being paid for through private donations.
“This Court should never have enjoined this project, but now, after the Saturday night attempted assassination, which could have never taken place in the new facility, reasonable minds can no longer differ – The injunction must be dissolved,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.
“The fact that an assassin came mere seconds from shooting the president – along with his family, the bulk of his Cabinet, his senior staff, and the Washington press corps—lays bare that D.C. does not have a secure space for large high-profile events, or one able to ‘accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government,’” the filing reads. “What he did on Saturday night could not have taken place in this new and highly secure facility!”
Observers, however, have pointed out that the press gala is a private event held outside the White House and that a new ballroom would not change that reality.
And Leon has previously rejected claims from the administration that halting work on the project endangers the life of the president or others at the White House.
“The court has taken defendants’ invocation of national security and presidential security seriously throughout this case, which is why I included a safety-and-security exception in my original order,” Leon wrote in his ruling earlier this month that rejected Trump’s bid to continue work on the entire project for national security purposes.
Lawyers for the trust, too, have stressed that they consider the safety and security of the president to be “of critical importance.” They told the Justice Department on Monday that its “assertion that this lawsuit puts the President’s life at ‘grave risk’ is incorrect and irresponsible.”
The group emphasized in a letter to the department that the case wasn’t focused on whether there should be a new ballroom built at the White House but rather whether Trump could proceed with such a massive change to the presidential residence without congressional approval.
A federal appeals court in Washington, DC, is set to hear arguments in early June over whether Leon erred when he ordered Trump to pause construction on the above-ground, nearly 90,000 square-foot event space.
