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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 interim U.S. attorney! Instead, she swapped out Habba with three different DOJ lawyers who collectively exercised the power of a U.S. attorney: Philip Lamparello, Jordan Fox, and Ari Fontecchio. Is that legal? Last week, U.S. District Judge Matthew Brann said no—they, too, were serving unlawfully as a “triumvirate” under both federal statutes and the Constitution’s appointments clause. He temporarily stayed his decision, but urged the administration to replace the triumvirate with a legitimate successor.

Which the administration for some reason refused to do.

Of course. And that’s a problem, because there’s a real possibility that indictments brought by the “triumvirate” will get tossed out because they lacked the power to bring them in the first place. So Judge Quraishi was angry about that. He pressed [prosecutor Daniel] Rosenblum on why his office kept the triumvirate in place when Judge [Matthew] Brann said it was illegal. Quraishi also seemed to have some intel that Alina Habba is still quietly playing a role in the operation of the office and demanded to know what she was doing. He used this hearing to try to get to the bottom of it.

It seems like the Justice Department’s plan was to send in this junior prosecutor, Daniel Rosenblum, who would respond to these questions with ignorance and say he didn’t know anything. Meanwhile, a more senior prosecutor named Mark Coyne would attest that Habba was not running the office and that the triumvirate was following the law. But Coyne failed to file a notice of appearance, so he had no right to participate in the hearing. And when he tried to defend the office, Judge Quraishi immediately cut him off and directed him to stay silent. Coyne would not comply with that order; he kept trying to defend his office. So Quraishi ordered him to leave at the threat of forcible removal by court security officers.

It reads like some kind of weird Marx Brothers script. It is so beyond comprehension that you could have a bunch of attorneys standing in front of a judge simply ignoring his directions, just not answering his questions, being told not to talk, and then talking anyway. I’ll read from the transcript. “Mr. Coyne, I told you not to address this court. You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside this court. … Kindly, I’m going to ask you to leave, or I’ll have you removed.” 

That left Daniel Rosenblum standing there just pantsed beyond belief. And he then has to explain who’s running the office, to which Quraishi responds: “What you’ve told me today, what your representation is … I don’t believe.” And then the judge orders the “triumvirate” to come in and testify, sequestering each of them so they can’t hear each other talk. I know this might sound like a “woke liberal judge” who hates Trump just going off on a poor, well-meaning public servant. But Quraishi is trying to rein in this utterly lawless Justice Department that answers to no one and lies constantly. And it seems like he decided this is what it takes.

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I just want to be clear that Judge Quraishi is a Joe Biden appointee, but he’s not a flaming liberal by any means. In fact, a bunch of progressives opposed his nomination because he has a strict law-and-order background. He served as assistant chief counsel at ICE. He served as a “detention adviser” in the military during the Iraq War. He was a prosecutor in the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office for five years. This is not a guy who lightly reams out federal prosecutors. But I think he’s profoundly disturbed that the Trump administration would dig in and maintain this unconstitutional leadership structure at the U.S. Attorney’s Office rather than just appoint a qualified U.S. attorney. He’s disgusted that his own former office cannot be trusted to tell the truth in court. And he’s worried that the everyday work of this office is being harmed by the endless drama over who’s leading it.

He was a former JAG. He’s a decorated service member who earned the Bronze Star and Combat Action Badge. This is not a woke lefty. This is a by-the-books guy who’s profoundly committed to the rule of law. They’re the ones who bristle the most when you have DOJ lawyers acting as though this is just a big funny Jell-O-wrestling tournament. He takes very, very seriously the ways in which the law is applied. And he’s now asking: Why are y’all just sitting there acting like this is a joke? And that is the interesting tell in this case. But I don’t want to get too far afield from the actual criminal sentencing hearing happening in his courtroom, which involved a man accused of possessing a vast amount of images depicting the sexual abuse of young children. As Judge Quraishi points out, this defendant is going to serve vastly less time in prison than the sentencing guidelines provide for, thanks to an arrestingly lenient plea deal that is born of what looks like incompetence. 

So in many ways, the big story here isn’t just that these guys disgraced themselves and that the judge called them out publicly. It’s that these battles over leadership and this weird Julius Caesar–style triumvirate of interim leadership may be trickling down in ways that lets horrible people get away with incredibly light sentences. Which is anathema to the party that runs on the rule of law and going after the bad guys.

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Exactly. As Judge Quraishi explained, for some reason prosecutors executed this plea deal before law enforcement had finished searching the defendant’s devices, and before investigators uncovered the full trove of illegal images that he possessed. It turns out to be way more than they thought when they negotiated the plea deal. Quraishi said they “screwed up,” and Rosenblum had to euphemistically admit to a “combination of errors.” It seems like prosecutors rushed through this plea agreement without knowing or caring that far more incriminating evidence was on the way.

What ices it is that Quraishi offered to postpone this hearing given Judge Brann’s ruling that the office is operating illegally. And the government said it didn’t want to because it was concerned for the rights of the defendant’s victims. Oh, really? The victims of a man who’ll skate with a light sentence under the guidelines quite possibly due to the chaos and incompetence of the U.S. Attorney’s Office? And Judge Quraishi said: If you’re letting this guy skate, you don’t get to pretend you care about victims’ rights. You don’t get to walk into my courtroom, pretend that’s top of mind, then obfuscate when I ask why your office is still running illegally. He would not tolerate it.

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