Trump administration urges court to dismiss White House ballroom suit, cites WHCA dinner shooting

The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner that President Donald Trump attended over the weekend, as well as the general safety of the president in general, played a prominent role in a new effort by the Justice Department to end an order that is preventing much of the construction of the proposed White House ballroom.

Big picture view:

Monday’s motion fulfills Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s pledge over the weekend to ask a federal court to dismiss the case if the plaintiffs, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, did not drop the case on its own. 

The nine-page filing specifically focused on the injunction and asked U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon to lift it, arguing that "[t]his Project will ensure that events like the horrific attack on Saturday night do not happen again. The Justice Department stated the injunction needed to be dissolved and went on to ask that the court "put an end to this frivolous lawsuit, which greatly endangers the lives of all Presidents, current and future."

The backstory:

The injunction was put in place by Leon and stopped above-ground construction on the $400 million ballroom that is being built on the site of the East Wing of the White House. It only allowed below-ground work on a bunker and other "national security facilities" to continue.

The bulk of the Justice Department’s motion recounted the events of Saturday night, in which a California man allegedly tried to rush into the WHCA annual dinner and assassinate Trump and members of his administration. Federal attorneys argued that Leon’s reasoning for the injunction, which included there would likely be no significant harm by delaying construction, was belied by the shooting. 

What they're saying:

"The attack confirms that this Court’s injunction is intolerable and unsustainable as a matter of equity and Law," the motion stated. "In addition to the multiple classified declarations to the contrary, the attack on Saturday night is proof positive that this wrongful injunction should be dissolved."

At several points, the filing shunned typical legal language and arguments to include multiple instances of mid-sentence words written in all caps, the usage of a middle name only when referencing former President Barack Obama, and multiple mentions of "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Dig deeper:

President Trump himself was one of the first to link Saturday’s shooting to the need for a ballroom, bringing it up in the hastily assembled news conference at the White House following the shooting. Speaking to reporters, many of whom were still in the tuxedos and ball gowns they wore to the dinner, Trump described the Washington Hilton, where the event was held, as not very secure and argued for the ballroom.

"I didn’t want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we are planning at the White House," Trump continued. "It’s actually a larger room and much more secure. It’s drone-proof. It’s got bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom."

The next day, supporters of the project echoed the president’s sentiment, while some called for an end to the lawsuit aiming to stop construction on the 90,000 square-foot ballroom.

Longtime South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham called the new ballroom "a national security necessity" that would give the Secret Service "immense control over the security environment of future events with a very hardened facility." 

Democratic Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, said the ballroom should be used for events like the correspondents’ association dinner and argued that all Americans were put in a vulnerable position by the night’s events because so many people in the presidential line of succession were at the event.