Inset: President Donald Trump speaks outside the Oval Office at the White House on Monday, April 13, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon). Background: Workers stand on scaffolding beside signage for the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on June 12, 2026. (Photo by Olivier Douliery/Abaca/Sipa USA – Sipa via AP Images).
President Donald Trump appointed himself chairman of the nonprofit Kennedy Center, unlawfully added his name to the building, threatened to demolish it after an order required his name to be removed and is now resisting discovery by invoking sweeping executive privilege, according to a court filing by a member of Congress.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and the only member of the Kennedy Center board of trustees to sue over Trump’s plans for the arts institution, told U.S. District Judge Christopher “Casey” Cooper that the Justice Department’s “unprecedented” claims of executive privilege are allowing the administration to control what evidence becomes available.
Several weeks earlier, the judge—who was appointed by former President Barack Obama—authorized Beatty to “seek discovery regarding” a “placard” that appeared to say “‘Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.’” Trump was photographed examining the sign aboard Air Force One.
Beatty is also seeking a “construction plan” and a PowerPoint presentation sent to board members 48 hours before a meeting that led to another “temporary” closure of the facility over what officials described as “significant safety hazards.”
In a filing Monday, Beatty said those efforts have met what she called a “stone wall of executive privilege.”
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“Chairman Trump personally announced the decision to shutter the Kennedy Center on February 1; the Board’s initial vote to close was obviously a mere formality, as Trump himself made clear at the time. Thus, even by Defendants’ account, Chairman Trump was intimately involved in making that decision. And he has continued to closely control the Kennedy Center since,” the filing stated. It argued that assessing the board’s decision—and determining whether defendants again “curated a stacked deck” or acted in bad faith—would be nearly impossible without knowing what instructions and input management received from Trump.
Beatty said she “does not bring this motion lightly.” But she argued that, without court intervention, the Kennedy Center defendants “will be allowed to curate the record and hide the truth from the Court” because the DOJ has declared those communications off-limits during discovery.
“The Department now refuses to provide any documents held by the Kennedy Center even touching on communications between the Chairman and management and intends to block all inquiry into those communications in depositions,” the filing said. It described the government’s position as a sweeping and apparently unprecedented assertion of privilege, noting that Trump is chairman of a nonprofit board and that his decisions and directives are central to the board’s conduct at issue in the lawsuit. Beatty warned that allowing the defendants to rely on the privilege claim would obstruct the search for the truth, undermine the court’s discovery order and damage public confidence in the proceedings.
Read the full filing here.
The post ‘Chairman’ Trump’s ‘instructions’ are at ‘heart of the decision to shut down’ Kennedy Center but he’s hiding behind executive privilege, lawmaker says first appeared on Law & Crime.