Imagine a nearly $1.8 billion government pot set up to pay people who claim they were targeted for their politics, a federal judge just slammed the brakes on it.

So here's what happened on Friday in Virginia. US District Judge Leonie Brinkema told the White House to stop, full stop, on its plan to create and run this massive compensation fund.

Her order means no money can be moved in, no claims can be looked at, and definitely no payouts can go out. She said the freeze was needed to make sure nothing was "irreversibly disbursed" before the courts actually decide if the whole thing is even legal.

It's a pretty big blow for one of Donald Trump's most controversial second-term projects.

The fund — officially called the "Anti-Weaponization Fund" by the Justice Department — was cooked up as part of an extraordinary settlement of Trump's own civil lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. The idea, according to the administration, was to compensate victims of what Trump keeps calling government "weaponisation" and "lawfare" — basically, his claim that conservatives and his supporters were unfairly prosecuted.

But the critics aren't buying it. They've been calling it a slush fund with no congressional authorisation, no clear legal basis, and almost zero public oversight. Their big worry? That it could end up rewarding loyalists — including some of the more than 1,500 people convicted over the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, who Trump granted clemency to on his first day back in office last year.

The lawsuit that triggered the freeze was brought by a group including Andrew Floyd, a former federal prosecutor who actually worked on those January 6 cases, and Jonathan Caravello, a California professor arrested at an immigration protest. They argued it's a "collusive agreement" between Trump and his own administration, with "no basis in law, and no accountability."

Judge Brinkema has set a hearing for June 12 to decide whether to keep the pause in place longer.

Right now, the programme is in limbo. The application process hadn't even started, and the Justice Department still hasn't named the five-member board that was supposed to decide who gets paid and how much. Meanwhile, the administration has been quietly scrubbing old DOJ press releases about January 6 prosecutions, calling them "partisan propaganda," and posting on social media that "we will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes."

Even some Republicans are nervous — Senate leaders reportedly delayed a big funding bill for Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week partly because they were worried January 6 defendants could end up getting taxpayer cash from this fund.

This is just one of several legal challenges now circling the fund, with more coming from police officers injured on January 6 and government watchdog groups.

The story, via cbinews.tv:

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