Who Is Jessie Liu, the Former U.S. Attorney a Federal Judge Wants to Investigate Trump Administration Lawyers?
Jessie Liu is the former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia — the nation's top federal prosecutor in the capital under President Donald Trump's first administration — and on Saturday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said she intends to appoint Liu as special master to investigate whether Justice Department and Interior Department lawyers misled the court or committed ethical violations in the legal fight over Trump's planned renovation of the East Potomac golf course in Washington. The two sides have until Friday to object in writing before the appointment is formalised.
The plain reality of the case is what put a prosecutor of Liu's standing in this position. The record before Reyes, a judge nominated by President Joe Biden, shows a court that ordered the government to give notice before altering the historic public course — and then learned the real plan from the president's own Truth Social posts, which said the park would close in mid-November to be renovated "as scheduled." At the October 30 hearing Reyes called to get answers, officials could not confirm plans that Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward then admitted had been developing for weeks, contradicting statements made to the court earlier in October. More than 400 trees had already been removed with less than a day's notice. The government, for its part, maintained the tree removals were necessary and not tied to the renovation — the dispute we covered when Judge Reyes first ordered the ethics inquiry.
Liu's own history with this administration is the detail that gives the appointment its edge. Trump nominated her in 2017 and the Senate confirmed her to run the largest U.S. Attorney's office in the country, where she oversaw cases referred by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, including the prosecution of Roger Stone, and decided there was not enough evidence to indict former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. In 2019 Trump moved to make her the No. 3 official at the Justice Department, then let the nomination die, and in February 2020 he withdrew a second nomination of her to a top Treasury post days before her confirmation hearing; she resigned from the government the next day, widely reported to have been judged insufficiently loyal. She is now a founding partner of the Washington law firm Liu Shur Kravis LLP.
"The question goes to whether or not I have been lied to, whether I have been lied to in declarations about the plans, whether I have been lied to about the timing of things." — Judge Ana Reyes, at the October 30 hearing
The common-sense principle is the one every courtroom runs on: a judge can only decide a case on what the lawyers in front of her say, so if the government's own lawyers cannot be believed, the process itself stops working. Reyes has said the government's attorneys have lost all credibility in her view, and she rejected the administration's attempt to have her removed from the case. The consequence of that breakdown is the step she took Saturday — bringing in an outside investigator — and Georgetown law professor David Super told the Associated Press that a judge opening a formal investigation of this kind "can be a precursor to holding someone in contempt of court." The immediate stakes arrive quickly: the administration plans to close East Potomac on November 15 for a 15-month rebuild into what it calls a world-class, championship-level course, preservationists and golfers who sued in February are asking Reyes to block the closure, and the hearing on that request is Friday, the same deadline for objections to Liu. Which leaves the question her appointment now hangs over the whole case: if a federal judge cannot trust what this administration's lawyers tell her in a fight over a golf course, what is a court supposed to do with their word in the cases that matter more?
The biographical details fill out why Reyes reached for this particular name. Liu, born in Kingsville, Texas in 1973, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1995 and from Yale Law School in 1998, clerked for a federal appeals court chief judge, and served as an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington from 2002 to 2006 before holding senior Justice Department posts under President George W. Bush, including in its National Security and Civil Rights divisions. As U.S. attorney she supervised more than 350 prosecutors handling both federal crimes and the capital's local prosecutions. None of that made her a figure of the left — she was Trump's own confirmed appointee, twice more his nominee — which is precisely what makes her findings, if the appointment proceeds, difficult for either side to dismiss. And it leaves Reyes's own words at that October hearing as the sentence the investigation will be judged against: "More than just being upset and furious right now, I am just beyond disappointed with the government."