Here is an interesting article echoing many of the qualms that have been continually voiced on this blog.
I do not have a lot of experience on this issue; sure, I've fought, bickered, disagreed, or been stupefied with some ASAs and AUSAs (and I am sure the feeling is mutual towards me) but, to my knowledge, it has been a rarity catching a blatantly deceptive prosecutor. Since I'm a former ASA with the Miami-Dade office (1987-1991), an affinity towards my former office may foster a rose-colored glasses scenario. I have detected a few suspicious actions but, for the most part, I do not handle the type of cases that rely on the use of informants that may lend itself to skullduggery. The unusual times I caught AUSAs doing something unscrupulous, I handled it myself rather than opt to take it to a higher source. There is no guarantee of honor anywhere if money, fame, power or advancement can be the reward for the outcome. Obviously, dishonesty is hardly limited to the Executive branch and I recognize that there have been many forms of greed and corruption that have plagued all facets of the "justice" system.
What interests me is taking a realistic look as to whether there is a distinct correlation between a political climate and what is mentioned in this article. Are prosecutors under pressure to carry out overriding agendas? Do the appointments of inexperienced players create a higher susceptibility to carrying out illicit objectives? Have ideologies, spite and vengeance infected the court system. That "civility" placard behind many judges can be a farce since it seems that the higher up you go in government, the less civility there may be.
There needs to be checks and balances in everything. What should be the checks and balances overseeing the Justice department?
Judges? Their rulings are now the subject of political jousts.
Defense Bar? Nah, too much of a conflict of interest.
Legislature? That may be the "pot calling the kettle black".
Civil review board? Unless you are a serious and studied insider, it would be pretty challenging for a layperson to even spot an issue.
I take no sides and do not know the answers. This article touches all that regularly walk through a court house and have certain expectations of having their sacred day in court.
So...thoughts?
Losing Trust in Justice Dept.,
Judges Call Out Its Lawyers’ Behavior
The federal courts have
long assumed that the government’s lawyers are trustworthy. Now judges across
the country are criticizing their lack of candor.
The notion that Justice Department
lawyers can be taken at their word, a longtime assumption that allows federal
courts to operate swiftly and smoothly, now appears to be in jeopardy. Credit...Eric Lee for The
New York Times
Mattathias
Schwartz reports on federal courts and judges.
June 1, 2026, 10:11 a.m. ET
In late April, a lawyer
for the Justice Department told a federal judge that her colleagues had been in
the midst of negotiations with a Rhode Island hospital about turning over
gender-transition treatment health records, only for the hospital’s lawyers to
stop responding.
But Judge Mary S.
McElroy of Federal District Court in Rhode Island concluded that was not true.
While the government claimed it had not heard from the hospital since February,
emails showed the hospital’s lawyers had stayed in close touch.
In a scathing ruling on May 14,
Judge McElroy called the government’s account “misleading, if not utterly
false.” At issue in Judge McElroy’s view was the “awesome power” wielded by
government lawyers and the trust that they will “play fair and be honest” with
courts.
The Justice Department
“has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case,” she wrote.
The opinion was one of several heated
rulings from federal judges in recent weeks castigating the government’s
lawyers for withholding information and making assertions that turned out to be
at odds with the facts.
A judge in Chicago
said transcripts of grand jury proceedings had been
redacted to hide misconduct by her district’s U.S. attorney’s office. Another
judge in Rhode Island referred an assistant U.S. attorney for potential discipline after he admitted that he
had knowingly withheld information from the court.
Like the one involving
the Rhode Island hospital, the complaints have come as administration lawyers
seek to defend major parts of President Trump’s agenda.
The government lawyers
whose honesty the judges have called into question are a mix of career civil
servants, political appointees and newcomers brought in as the Justice
Department makes a public hiring push to fill its depleted ranks. Their missteps in court come as the
department’s leadership takes an unusually combative tone with judges who rule
against them, and department lawyers try to balance judges’ demands against the
often stubborn posture of the executive-branch clients they represent.
But regardless, an
increasing number of judges appear to be questioning the longtime assumption
that Justice Department lawyers can be taken at their word, part of the
“presumption of regularity” that experts say allows federal courts to operate
swiftly and smoothly.
In a statement, a Justice Department
spokeswoman disputed that lawyers were coming up short on ethics. “Any attack
on the professionalism or integrity of D.O.J. attorneys is outrageous and
unjustified,” said the spokeswoman, Natalie Baldassarre. “The department will
continue to vigorously advance and defend President Trump’s agenda in federal
court with the utmost respect for the institution and rule of law.”
By giving voice to their
lack of trust, the judges are heralding major risk to a legal order that has
been in place since Watergate. Codified in a Justice Department reference text
called the Justice Manual, the
basic idea is that department lawyers should be held to a higher standard
because they carry with them the reputation of the entire executive branch.
Before her death in 2019, Judge Patricia Wald described her expectations of
the Justice Department as the “five C’s”: competence, credibility, civility,
consistency and candor.
“You can’t hide the
ball. You have to be honest,” said Andrew C. Mergen, who served in the Justice
Department for more than 30 years under presidents of both parties and now
teaches at Harvard Law School. The pattern of judges accusing department
lawyers of dishonesty, he said, “is such an extraordinarily awful look for the
Justice Department.”
‘The Duty of Candor’
The recent wave of
rebukes surrounding courtroom honesty has come after months of clear warnings
from the judiciary about separate but related concerns.
Judges have over the
past year called out the administration for making dodgy legal arguments, filing dishonest testimony and failing to comply with court orders. Some of the
earlier problems stem from the fact that Justice Department lawyers often
represent other government agencies in court, including the Homeland Security
Department, which has proved to be a difficult client, particularly in
immigration cases.
But judges have taken a distinctly
harsher tone in recent weeks, assigning responsibility directly to individual
Justice Department lawyers for their own representations in court.
“This reckless disregard
for the duty of candor owed to a federal court is appalling,” wrote Judge
McElroy, referring to lawyers’ ethical obligation to never knowingly present
false evidence or make false statements of fact or law. She cited recent cases
in Pennsylvania, Washington and Oregon in which other judges raised questions
about the government’s honesty.
The same issue arose in
Chicago, where Judge April M. Perry found that Justice Department lawyers
had improperly influenced a grand jury in a case in
which the government was seeking indictments against four activists who were
protesting outside an immigration detention facility.
Beyond the potential
misconduct with the grand jury, Judge Perry found the lawyers were dishonest
with her by cutting out portions of transcripts they provided her about what
had unfolded. “Mistakes happen,” she said at a hearing in May. “But as I tell my
children, you own it. You admit to it. You apologize for it, and you move on.
What you do not do is hide it.”
In one of the Rhode
Island cases, the federal bench appointed an outside counsel to investigate the
head of the civil division of the U.S. attorney’s office for withholding
information from her about a migrant whose case appeared before her. Judge
Melissa R. DuBose said she believed the lawyer showed a “lack of candor” and
that the incident represented “a serious breakdown in the ethical codes.”
In a May 22 ruling, Judge
Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. of the Middle District of Tennessee raised doubts about
a former prosecutor’s claim that he — and not his bosses in Washington — had
been the one to revive a criminal case against a Salvadoran man whose
immigration saga is among the best known of the Trump administration’s
crackdown.
Last year, the Supreme
Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of that man, Kilmar Armando
Abrego Garcia, to the United States after he was improperly deported from
Maryland to El Salvador in what the government called an “administrative
error.”
Robert E. McGuire, then
the chief federal prosecutor in Judge Crenshaw’s district, told the judge that
he alone made the decision to then indict Mr. Abrego Garcia on human trafficking
charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop. In fact, emails showed that Justice Department leaders in
Washington stayed in close touch with him about the case, calling it a “top
priority” and sending him information about a new witness after homeland
security officials decided to reopen the investigation.
The judge expressed serious skepticism
about Mr. McGuire’s account of his own decision-making, referring to the
prosecutor’s “purported belief” and saying that he considered Mr. McGuire’s
testimony, “to the extent that it is credible.”
Image
A judge in Tennessee cast doubt on the
testimony of a prosecutor who brought charges against Kilmar Armando Abrego
Garcia.Credit...Tierney
L. Cross/The New York Times
‘It Will Get Harder’
The government’s responses to these
charges have varied — an apology in the Rhode Island case before Judge DuBose,
a claim in the Chicago case that there was no intent to mislead and a more
combative posture in the case before Judge McElroy insisting that the
government never misrepresented the facts.
In public statements,
Justice Department officials have attacked “rogue judges” and “activist
judges,” who they claimed were abusing their authority, and in some cases filed
misconduct complaints against them. Judge DuBose and Judge Perry are appointees
of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Judge McElroy was appointed by Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Mergen, the
Harvard law professor, said he has heard from career Justice Department lawyers
who were demoralized by the pressures of the job, particularly the flood of
petitions from immigrants challenging their detention. Pressure from the high workload,
he said, was aggravated by a combination of a politicized institutional culture
and judges’ growing skepticism — all of which could be contributing to the
courtroom missteps.
“The risk is that the
longer this goes on, the fewer good people are willing to stay,” he said. “Over
time, it will get harder to do even the routine cases if judges don’t trust
you.”
During prior
administrations, a job as an assistant U.S. attorney was a coveted status
marker for lawyers. Under the Trump administration, the department has borrowed
lawyers from the Homeland Security Department and the military, posted job
solicitations online and offered starting bonuses. Not only are applications
down, but those who are applying are also generally less qualified, officials have said.
In an interview, Julie T. Le, a former
administration lawyer who spoke out about her enormous caseload and is
now running for Congress as a Democrat, said many of
the difficulties she experienced arose from having to collaborate with the
Homeland Security Department.
There, she said, lawyers
were “used to the old way” of working in the immigration court system, which,
unlike the federal courts, is under the control of the executive branch. When
it came to complying with court orders, she said, “they didn’t understand. Or
they understood, but they didn’t care.”
In a statement, Lauren
Bis, the acting assistant secretary for public affairs at the Homeland Security
Department, said its lawyers “conduct themselves with the highest integrity.”
The department is not interested “in the opinions of deep state activists,” she
added.
The Rhode Island case is
one of several lawsuits stemming from a Trump administration effort to obtain
the health records of young transgender patients in what it characterizes as an
investigation into fraud.
The investigation into
Rhode Island Hospital, according to the government, is being run out of the
Northern District of Texas, which Judge McElroy called “a distant forum” chosen
by the Justice Department because it was “friendly to its political positions.”
Judge Reed O’Connor of the Texas court continues to oversee the case and has
ordered Rhode Island Hospital to turn over the subpoenaed records, which will
be held by the court pending the outcome of two appeals. He was appointed by
President George W. Bush.
Judge McElroy also
rebuked a Justice Department lawyer for telling Judge O’Connor that the
department required “patient level” data, failing to note that it had settled
on receiving anonymous data in other jurisdictions.
The claim that the Justice Department
“needed this information,” she wrote, was “at best, deceptive, if not
intentionally and knowingly false.”
