Trump Files Emergency Appeal To Keep Building His Ballroom, Claims It’s a Matter of National Security

(AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The Trump administration has filed an emergency appeal to continue building his $400 million ballroom, arguing that the structure’s completion is a matter of national security.

The 27-page motion filed Friday night in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit claimed that U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s “shocking, unprecedented, and improper injunction” to stop construction would put the lives of Trump, his family, and White House staffers in danger.

In the motion, Justice Department lawyers wrote that the ballroom and its subsequent basement bunker, was necessary to defend Trump against “hostile attacks via drones, ballistic missiles, bullets, biohazards” and other potential threats.

“Time is of the essence!” the attorneys wrote.

Stopping construction by April 14, as ordered in the injunction, would leave “a massive excavation and structurally completed site adjacent to the now open and exposed Executive Mansion and threatening grave national-security harms to the White House, the President and his family, and the President’s staff,” the lawyers wrote.

Trump’s attorneys argued that The National Trust should have seen the ballroom project coming because it was all over the media, despite the fact that Trump began demolishing the East Wing of the White House without any consultation.

The injunction “could have been sought long ago, prior to the start of construction (in that there was full knowledge, through large scale media attention and publicity, that the White House ballroom was planned to be built, and there would have been a great deal of time for them to object, long before the start of construction, even though their objection would likewise have been baseless and frivolous),” the attorneys argued.

The motion gives some indication of the scale of Trump’s ballroom project, by mentioning that “the bomb shelters, hospital and medical area, protective partitioning, and Top Secret Military installations, structures, and equipment, are built and/or ready to be built, installed, and placed. ”

The filing comes after federal judge Richard Leon ordered Trump to halt building his much-publicized and much-criticized ballroom on Tuesday. Leon granted a request for a preliminary injunction by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, saying Trump cannot proceed with the project — — which Trump is funding via private donations and his own dough — until it is approved by Congress.

Trump railed against the injunction in a lengthy Truth Social post calling The National Trust for Historic Preservation, “a Radical Left Group of Lunatics.”

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