Watchdog laughs at Trump's new ballroom dodge

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is blasting the Trump administration’s claim that a foiled plot at the White House’s “open air” UFC event justifies President Donald Trump’s ballroom — noting the 4,000-person event would not have fit inside the structure, and that law enforcement had disrupted the plot four days before it took place.

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced “charges against five men for an alleged plot to carry out an attack to kill government officials and others attending the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Freedom 250 event held at the White House last Sunday.”

Reiterating that it “takes the President’s safety and security seriously,” an attorney for the National Trust wrote that the Trump administration “repeatedly advanced national security arguments to the District Court—including on remand from this Court, when such issues were the sole focus.”

“Last Sunday’s event, with 4,000 attendees, would not have even fit in the proposed ballroom,” attorney Thaddeus A. Heuer wrote. Heuer noted that the alleged plot had been “‘detected and disrupted’ four days” before Sunday’s UFC event at the White House.

“Nothing in the injunction halting above-ground ballroom construction limited the security options available to law enforcement for the President’s open-air UFC event,” he wrote. “Indeed, the President, the Vice-President, and Speaker Johnson all attended, with full Secret Service knowledge of the alleged plot that was ‘detected and disrupted’ four days earlier.”

Heuer added that the U.S. Supreme Court “could not have been clearer.” The Constitution, he wrote, “forbids the President from exercising powers vested solely in Congress, even when he asserts that a ‘national catastrophe’ ‘endanger[ing] the well-being and safety’ of the country and ‘immediately jeopardiz[ing]’ national defense requires it.”

The president, argued Heuer, is not permitted to “freely violate the separation of powers.”

What the president can do, said Heuer, is get congressional authorization.

He wrote, “if the President believes any particular security incident bears persuasively on the need for a White House ballroom, he has the same remedy as his predecessors: obtain authorization from Congress, the body in which the Constitution vests plenary authority over the nation’s property.”

This was not the first time the Trump administration had made similar arguments to advance its case for the need for a White House ballroom.

After the alleged assassination attempt during the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, the president argued for the need for the ballroom, The Guardian reported in April. The WHCA reportedly hosts roughly 2,600 people at its annual fundraising dinner, while Trump’s proposed ballroom is believed to be designed to seat about one thousand people

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