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Donald Trump’s Department of Justice faced one of its harshest judicial rebukes so far, at an explosive Monday hearing that laid bare the disturbing incompetence and contempt currently plaguing the entire agency. U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi castigated the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office for operating illegally and took the rare step of throwing a prosecutor out of his courtroom for insubordination, according to a transcript obtained by the New York Times. He also accused DOJ lawyers of destroying the office’s good standing with the judiciary and suggested that its incompetence has allowed defendants to evade just penalties for heinous crimes.

On this week’s Slate Plus bonus episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern discussed the acrimonious hearing and its implications for the DOJ’s ongoing collapse as a trusted agency. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: This was the worst judicial neck-punching I think I’ve ever seen. Judge Quraishi told these prosecutors: “Generations of Assistant U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of [your] office for your generation to destroy it within a year. … That is what has happened to the credibility of your office.” I’d think any lawyer facing that kind of judicial wrath and fury would crawl into their bathtub with a bottle of vodka and never emerge. And yet these lawyers, I guess, will live to fight another day. Can you walk us through how we got here?

Mark Joseph Stern: First, I think it’s worth highlighting that this was supposed to be an unremarkable sentencing hearing for a defendant who pleaded guilty to possessing child sexual abuse material. But Judge Quraishi instead turned it into an interrogation of some legally questionable maneuvers by the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office. You may remember that last year, Trump appointed his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, to be New Jersey’s interim U.S. attorney. Then he and Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to keep her in place after her term expired. They were smacked down in court and Habba got bounced from the office. But Bondi refused to replace her with another........

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