The New York Times reports:

Justice Department lawyers have long enjoyed a professional benefit when they appear in court. As a general rule, judges tend to take them at their word and assume they are telling the truth.

But in the past several months, as members of President Trump’s Justice Department have repeatedly misled the courts, violated their orders and demonized judges who have ruled against them, some jurists have started to show an angry loss of faith in the people and the institution they once believed in most.

The dissolution of these traditional bonds of trust — known in legal circles as the presumption of regularity — goes well beyond judges’ use of blunt words — “egregious,” “brazen,” “lawless” — to describe the various parts of Mr. Trump’s power-grabbing policy agenda.

Ultimately, legal experts say, the doubts that judges have begun to express about the department and those who represent it could have a more systemic effect and erode the healthy functioning of the courts.

“I think people don’t fully appreciate how much the ability of the legal system to work on a daily basis rests on the government’s credibility,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor. “Without that credibility, it’s going to be harder for the government to do anything in court — even ordinary things. All of a sudden, you’re going to have courts second-guessing things that they wouldn’t have before.”

While it is impossible to know for sure how deeply this distrust has set in among judges across the country, a number of judges in recent weeks have openly questioned the fundamental honesty and credibility of Justice Department lawyers in ways that would have been unthinkable only months ago.

In June, for instance, an order was unsealed in Federal District Court in Washington showing Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui ripping into prosecutors after they tried to convince him that he needed to be “highly deferential” to their request to keep sealed a search warrant in an ordinary criminal case.

“Blind deference to the government?” Judge Faruqui wrote. “That is no longer a thing. Trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.”

After all, as the judge pointed out, Justice Department lawyers under Mr. Trump have done much to destroy the confidence normally afforded them in court.

They have fired prosecutors who worked on Mr. Trump’s two criminal cases, he said. They have attacked the charges brought against the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as a witch hunt. And they have violated judicial orders in cases stemming from Mr. Trump’s deportation policies and from his efforts to freeze federal grants.

“These norms being broken must have consequences,” Judge Faruqui concluded. “High deference is out; trust but verify is in.”

All of this echoed the explosive remarks made from the bench last month by Judge Paula Xinis, who lashed out at the Justice Department during a hearing in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March.

Before the hearing, in Federal District Court in Maryland, Judge Xinis had spent weeks trying to get the department to comply with her orders in the case — and then to answer questions about why they had been flouted in the first place.

She finally lost all patience after some of the same lawyers failed to give her a straight answer about what the administration planned to do with Mr. Abrego Garcia after he was brought back from El Salvador to face criminal charges.

“This has been the process from Day 1,” Judge Xinis told the lawyers. “You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it in my view.” [Continue reading…]