Trump gets initial legal win over election interference judge in separate case

A federal appeals court has temporarily blocked U.S. District judge Tanya Chutkan's ruling on funding for climate programs implemented by former president Joe Biden.

The D.C. Court of Appeals paused the federal judge's order Tuesday requiring Citibank to release billions of dollars in green bank grants that had been clawed back by president Donald Trump's administration, saying that a partial stay on Chutkan's ruling would give the court "sufficient opportunity" to examine the issue, reported Newsweek.

"The purpose of this order is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the district court's forthcoming opinion in support of its order granting a preliminary injunction together with the emergency motion for stay pending appeal and any response thereto, and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion," the appeals court wrote in its ruling.

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Chutkan issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday prohibiting the Environmental Protection Agency and its administrator Lee Zeldin from suspending or terminating the grants issued in 2022, but the appeals court found that the reasoning for her decision did not meet the standard required for such an injunction.

Zeldin described the grants awarded to nonprofit climate groups to gold bars being "tossed off the Titanic" and claimed the program was riddled with fraud, but Chutkan, who oversaw the president's federal 2020 election obstruction case before it was dismissed upon his re-election, said there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities have sued the EPA and Citibank to provide access to the $14 million they had been awarded under the Biden climate initiative.