DOJ tells judge who called it 'beyond the pale' that nearly 300 more trees are already marked.

…(cont) Then came the trees. Workers arrived at the East Potomac Golf Links over the weekend and removed hundreds of them, part of the president's renovation plan for the course. Notice went out Friday afternoon. The saws were running by Saturday morning. On Monday, in U.S. District Court, Judge Ana Reyes asked Department of Justice lawyers to explain the gap between what they had promised and what their client had done. "I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done," she said. By the end of the hearing she had reached for a harder phrase: the destruction, she said, had cost the government "all of its credibility." Government lawyers then confirmed that nearly 300 additional trees are already marked for removal, same park, same method.

This was not an isolated bad weekend for a federal park. In September, the administration blocked $25 million meant for projects at Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, and Joshua Tree. In October, a separate judge halted border-wall construction through Big Bend National Park. A pattern needs no adjective. It only needs a calendar.

Preceded in death by the notice that was supposed to come first, filed late on a Friday and gone before the weekend started — standard operating procedure, which an older generation of clerks would have called malarkey.

Survived by nearly 300 more trees, already marked for the same fate, and by a judge's word for what the government's account of itself is worth: none.

In lieu of flowers, give back the plain courtesy of telling a court, and the public, before the trucks arrive.