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One Judicial Opinion That Sums Up Everything  (Olivia Manes and Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare)
Today, let’s reach back to a nearly-month-old opinion by Judge Paula Xinis of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
The opinion ordered the release of one Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the El Salvadoran man who was wrongfully removed from the United States and dumped in the notorious CECOT prison in his home country, then brought back under indictment in Tennessee, and whose civil litigation Judge Xinis has been supervising in Maryland since last spring. 
The opinion got a flurry of attention when Judge Xinis issued it—both because it finally caused Abrego to walk free and because of the extraordinary evidentiary record it cited of government lies and misconduct in the case. 
It didn’t get enough attention.
The opinion is worth a close read a month later.
The opinion brings together, in a brief 31 pages, a number of distinct themes that have presented themselves in litigation—civil and criminal—involving Trump administration actions.
At various times over the past year, these litigations have underscored the lawlessness of administration action; they have highlighted the targeting of political foes for vindictive and retributive reasons; they have featured defiance of court orders; and they have featured outright lying both by lawyers and by officials of client agencies to the courts.
Rarely, however, have all of these themes come together with such an unambiguous evidentiary record, fleshed out with such an economy of words.
It is rare that a single judicial opinion condenses so many of the key pathologies of the government’s approach to litigation in a single place in a readable format without particular intrusion of complex law or even factual dispute.
Judge Xinis has been among the most skillful judges in managing the government’s mendacious approach to litigation over the past year. She has been careful. She has been tough. She has been surefooted. And this opinion should not have gotten lost in the holiday cheer and been a one-day story. It’s an important statement that likely won’t be her last word on the subjects it addresses.

Depleted and Distracted, Justice Dept. Staff Fear Losing Focus on Potential Threats  (Michael S. Schmidt, Devlin Barrett, and Jonah E. Bromwich,New York Times)
Rank-and-file prosecutors and agents have expressed serious concern that a hobbled work force hurts the government’s ability to identify and stop terrorist plots, cyberattacks, mass violence and fraud.