Workers began removing President Donald Trump’s name from an exterior wall of the Kennedy Center early Saturday morning, video from a CNN crew appeared to show.
Justice department attorneys representing the center said late Friday that while work was ongoing, thunderstorms in the Washington area caused delays. They said crews expected to fully remove Trump’s name “in the early hours” of Saturday.
US District Judge Casey Cooper had set a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Friday for the center to certify compliance with his order. The judge hasn’t yet responded to the center’s request for additional time to say that it has carried out his demand.
Crews began assembling scaffolding underneath the exterior signage of the building Friday. Shortly before 2 a.m. Saturday, workers started to drape a covering around the scaffolding, essentially blocking the view of their progress, as people in a crowd below chanted, “Shame!”
A little after 3 a.m., crews appeared to be removing the letters, video shot through a small opening in the scaffolding covering showed.
Earlier Friday, an appeals court kept intact a federal judge’s ruling requiring the Kennedy Center to remove the president’s name from its building by the end of Friday, rejecting a last-minute effort by the center to freeze the ruling while more court proceedings play out.
The appeals court did not explain its reasoning for its decision in a brief, unsigned ruling. The panel included Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee; Patricia Millett, an appointee of former President Barack Obama; and Robert Wilkins, also an Obama appointee.from its building, website, promotional materials and other areas. But even as the legal wrangling plays out in coming weeks, the center must, for now, take steps to completely comply with the judge’s directive.
The center had taken steps in recent days to reverse the change in some places but kept letters spelling “The Donald J. Trump and” on the front of
The judges asked for more written legal arguments to be submitted later this month over the center’s bid to pause the lower-court’s ruling that said it must remove Trump’s name