Court hearing goes 'exceptionally badly' for Trump DOJ as judge loses patience: reporter

Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney on Tuesday brought word that the Trump Department of Justice stumbled badly in trying to justify freezing funds for the United States Agency for International Development.

During a hearing in front of United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amir Ali, DOJ lawyers took heat for refusing to say if the government had taken any steps to comply with Ali's earlier order to unfreeze funding for USAID.

At one point, wrote Cheney, Ali seemed to lose his patience.

"I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you," he said. "Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before Feb. 13?"

The attorney representing the government simply replied that, "I’m not in a position to answer that."

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"This continues to be going exceptionally badly for DOJ, which can't seem to give a straight answer to the judge's questions here: 'We’re now 12 days in ... You can’t answer me whether any funds that you kind of acknowledged are covered by the court’s order have been unfrozen?'" Cheney wrote in a follow-up post on BlueSky.

At the end of the hearing, reported Politico's Josh Gerstein, Ali sided with the plaintiffs in the case and said that bills related to USAID that were incurred before February 13 must be paid by midnight on Wednesday.