Judge Rips Apart DOJ’s Bonkers Claim About Trump’s Ballroom With Just 1 Burn | EUROtoday

A federal decide definitely didn’t dance round how he actually felt about one of many Justice Department’s claims about President Donald Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom challenge.

At a listening to in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon appeared typically unimpressed by the arguments made by the DOJ’s legal professionals that Trump had the authorized authority to demolish the whole lot of the White House’s East Wing to erect his cartoonishly giant occasion house with out congressional approval, CNN reviews.

But there was one argument so absurd that the decide couldn’t assist however name it out.

The DOJ’s legal professionals contended {that a} federal regulation already authorizes the president to make “alterations” and “improvements” to the White House “as the president may determine,” after which had the gall to characterize Trump’s ballroom challenge as merely an “alteration.”

Leon, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, advised the DOJ’s attorneys that labeling Trump’s excessive White House makeover as “an alteration… takes some brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary.”

Leon additionally acquired fairly miffed when a DOJ lawyer in contrast Trump’s pricy vainness challenge to previous initiatives at nationwide parks, the Washington Post reviews.

Leon rejected the comparability by saying that the White House “is a special place.”

“This is an iconic symbol of this nation,” Leon added whereas noting that Trump is a “steward” of the White House, and never its proprietor.

The case got here to the D.C. district courtroom after the National Trust for Historic Preservation within the United States — a nonprofit that oversees the preservation of historic buildings — requested Leon to subject a short lived injunction to halt development till congressional approval is granted.

The decide stated he would make his ruling by the tip of March, and the White House stated it desires to start out aboveground development of the ballroom by April, the Post notes.

“It would have been a heck of a lot easier by any standard to have just gone to Congress to get the authority to do it,” Leon stated at one level in the course of the listening to whereas he was reprimanding the federal government for its “shifting theories and shifting dynamics,” per CNN.

Leon’s remarks in regards to the DOJ offering “shifting” justifications for the challenge make much more sense if you keep in mind that simply final month, legal professionals for the division stated in a courtroom submitting that the ballroom has “national security implications” and that they’ll enchantment any opposed choice.