Deadline: Legal Blog
Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, said in a new court filing that “the public need for access could not be greater.”
A Democratic lawmaker told a federal judge that President Donald Trump’s Kennedy Center allies are improperly hiding documents about their attempt to shutter the storied institution that Trump has sought to recast in his image.
Citing the right of public access, Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, urged U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to unseal the documents.
“Here, the public need for access could not be greater,” Beatty’s lawyers said a motion filed Tuesday.
She has already successfully sued to remove Trump’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which, by law, is a memorial to the late president.
She then brought an emergency motion to halt the Trump-aligned board’s latest Trump-friendly efforts, which include an attempt to return his name to the center despite Cooper’s prior ruling ordering it removed. After a hearing last week, Justice Department lawyers said the defendants would agree to hold off on carrying out those efforts until Oct. 8. Cooper could rule to block them by then.
In the meantime, Beatty’s latest motion concerns documents on which the board has purportedly relied in seeking to shutter the center, which the government has suggested it might demolish if it isn’t allowed to conduct its desired renovations.
“The question at issue is whether to close the nation’s preeminent performing arts center for two years as part of a renovation being conducted with appropriated public monies,” Beatty’s lawyers said in Tuesday’s motion. “This Court has already found that the first attempt at this decision fell ‘grossly short of prudent decision-making,’” they reminded the Obama-appointed judge.
They said the documents at issue contained “no cost-benefit analysis of closure” and were “riddled with internal inconsistencies and do not identify even a single benefit to remaining partially open while renovating.” They asked Cooper to order the documents unsealed or at least to make the defendants “propose and substantiate any narrowly tailored redactions.”
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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