Park Service Gave Notice at 4:55 p.m. Friday, Then Cut Hundreds of Trees Saturday. The Count Is 430 or 529.

A federal judge in Washington on Monday extended an order barring the National Park Service from removing any more trees at East Potomac Golf Links, routine maintenance included, until 2 p.m. Tuesday. It followed a weekend in which crews cut hundreds of trees after a government filing that landed just before 5 p.m. on a Friday.

The notice that was never an order

The sequence matters because the dispute is about timing. According to ABC News, Justice Department lawyers gave the plaintiffs notice at 4:55 p.m. Friday that cutting would begin over the Columbus Day weekend. Crews started Saturday. The D.C. Preservation League, which sued with two golfers to stop the broader overhaul Trump wants for the public course, filed for an emergency restraining order Sunday, and Reyes held a hearing of nearly four hours on Monday, CBS News reported.

Reyes told the court she had said at a May hearing that she did not want 10 trees chopped down without someone having notice. When a Justice Department lawyer, Marissa Piropato, said the government had done its best to provide notice, the judge answered: "You did not do your best. You did your absolute worst."

One detail from the hearing shapes what happens next. Reyes said the only reason she had not yet issued a show-cause order on contempt is that she never put the notice request into a formal order, ABC reported, adding that she regretted it. The 72-hour rule she described Monday would put the expectation in writing.

Two counts of the same trees

Piropato told the court that 430 trees came down over the weekend, according to ABC and The Hill. The Preservation League's lawyers said Sunday that all 529 had been cut on Saturday alone, including what they described as healthy, mature oaks and maples, CBS reported. The 529 figure also appears in a declaration from Kevin Griess, superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks, timestamped 4:37 p.m. Friday, estimated 529 trees in all, with a first group of 169 and a second of 90. Coverage reviewed here does not explain the gap between that estimate and the 430 the government's own lawyer cited.

What each side says the cutting is

The government's position is that the work is a separate maintenance project and not part of the contested redevelopment, Newsweek reported. Griess testified that the tree plan implements a 2019 Cultural Landscape Report, which, as CBS quoted it, calls for "links style and historic vegetation" including thin trees between fairways. He said he sent the plan to the head of the Park Service on Oct. 5, received approval the next day, and moved once funding and staff tied to America's 250th birthday events were freed up after an August Grand Prix. This reporting did not reach the 2019 report itself, so that description rests on CBS's quotation of it.

“It's about the restoration of the park to its original historic state.”

The plaintiffs' argument is a legal one. They contend that the tree removal is a segment of a larger project that, in their words, "will require massive tree-clearing," and that splitting it into smaller pieces lets the administration avoid the environmental review the National Environmental Policy Act requires, CBS reported.

“unprecedented in East Potomac Park's 130-year history”

The government's own witnesses complicated the maintenance framing on one point. Both Griess and Frank Lands, the Park Service's deputy director for operations, told the court there was no particular urgency to cut on Saturday, CBS reported. Newsweek reported that Lands said he learned of the plan on Oct. 5, and Reyes ordered him to preserve all communications about the project, including notes from the meeting that day.

What is still open

Reyes has not ruled on whether the tree removal violates federal law. Monday's orders concern preserving the status quo while she decides. Her questions about whether the government misled her in declarations about its plans and timing are questions, not findings, and she scheduled testimony Tuesday from Greg Wischer, a political appointee at the Interior Department who ABC described as a point person on many of Trump's Washington beautification projects.

There is also no base rate in the sources reviewed for how often a court sees a disputed notice sequence like this one, so this report does not characterize it as typical or unusual. What the record does show is narrower: a notice window of hours, a cutting count the two sides put 99 trees apart, and a judge preparing to turn a spoken expectation into a written deadline.