By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Friday refused to stop the White House from staging a UFC show this weekend in an elaborate ring already built on the South Lawn to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary — on President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling allows organizers to use the White House lawn as the venue for Sunday’s planned UFC mixed martial arts event.
Mehta concluded that the plaintiffs likely don’t have legal standing to challenge the event and have failed to prove that they would suffer irreparable harm by the event going forward as planned. The judge also cited the plaintiffs’ “unreasonable delay” in suing to challenge an event that’s been in the works for months.
“In the context of an emergency application — and coupled with the fact that the UFC fight date was long ago known — it is fair to say Plaintiffs unreasonably delayed bringing suit, undercutting their claims of irreparable harm,” Mehta wrote.
Attorneys from the nonprofit Public Integrity Project sued to challenge Trump’s “UFC Freedom 250” event on behalf of an activist and a Vietnam War veteran. The two plaintiffs also asked the court to block organizers from building anything for the event on White House grounds, including a 92-foot-tall, 600-ton steel structure called The Claw.
The plaintiffs’ alleged “aesthetic harms,” the judge noted, are temporary since The Claw will be disassembled starting Monday morning and staging equipment at the Lincoln Memorial must be removed before then. “The President’s musings about permanency of the Claw does not move the dial in the face of a White House official’s clear representation,” the judge wrote.
The White House called the lawsuit a baseless attempt to prevent Trump from hosting an event that’s no different from many others routinely hosted at public forums in the nation’s capital.
Trump’s administration can’t issue permits for sporting events on the South Lawn or at the Lincoln Memorial, where UFC fighters planned to hold a press conference in front of fans on Friday, according to plaintiffs’ attorneys. They noted that the event is a privately organized, for-profit business venture, with VIP packages costing millions of dollars.
“The President’s administration is granting the UFC an extraordinary business opportunity it may not lawfully grant, and in exchange the UFC is throwing an event at which its leadership, fighters, advertisers, and various celebrities will all pay tribute to the President on his birthday,” plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote.
Public Integrity Project attorney Brendan Ballou said the plaintiffs were disappointed in the judge’s decision but respect it and intend to “keep bringing cases to raise the cost of corruption in America.”
“This isn’t a case about a sporting event, it’s about corruption, as a handful of people and companies stand to profit from our public monuments,” Ballou said in a statement.
The National Park Service and the Interior Department are named as defendants in the lawsuit.
In 2019, during his first term in office, Trump became the first sitting president to attend a UFC show. Trump, a Republican, is a friend of UFC president and CEO Dana White.
Mehta was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, a Democrat. Mehta has presided over other Trump-related cases, including civil litigation accusing Trump of inciting a mob of his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, a Democrat.