DC golf course dispute

DOJ lawyer behind Alaska ballots case faces inquiry in DC golf course dispute

By John Fritze

A top Justice Department official who is a leading force behind an effort to halt certification in Alaska’s Senate race if the GOP doesn’t win endured a brutal hearing Friday in which a federal judge opened an investigation into whether he misrepresented the president’s plans to renovate a golf course.

In a fiery hearing that lasted nearly three hours in Washington, DC, US District Judge Ana C. Reyes pressed Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward on whether the administration had tried to evade the court’s review, including by offering only a last-minute notice to the court before felling hundreds of trees at East Potomac Golf Course earlier this month.

“Let’s not play games anymore, Mr. Woodward,” Reyes, a nominee of former President Joe Biden, told the third-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department.

Now Woodward will have to pivot back to the Alaska case, where the Justice Department has filed a placeholder civil case to challenge the results of an election in which Democrats allegedly recruited a candidate with the same name as the Republican incumbent, Daniel Sullivan, to siphon away votes. The department has also accelerated a criminal probe into that effort.

A federal judge in the civil case ordered DOJ to file new paperwork in that case later Friday.