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... During a conference with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, former antitrust division attorney Seth Kirschenbaum said that when he worked for the Justice Department in the early '80s, it was the highest honor of his career. And yet today, he said the country faces a situation where Justice Department lawyers have lied to courts and defied orders.

As a result, a growing number of federal judges have ended a practice called the "presumption of regularity," the tradition of assuming that representations of fact by Justice Department lawyers to federal judges are accurate, Kirschenbaum said.

In a recent filing, the Justice Department's lead attorney acknowledged that the Trump administration has violated federal court orders on more than 50 occasions as it's prosecuted immigration cases in the state of New Jersey.

"The Department of Justice is under extreme pressure, and many veteran prosecutors have been forced out," Kirschenbaum said. He added that divisions that enforce tax fraud and foreign bribery rules had been "decimated" as the Trump administration weaponizes the agency to seek retribution against perceived enemies with threats and intimidation. ...