GREENBELT, MD—If the Justice Department had brazenly defied a judge’s order a year ago the way it did again today in the Abrego Garcia case, it would have been a banner headline and the buzz of legal circles.

But 10 months into the Trump II presidency, it’s become all too normal for his Justice Department to refuse to comply with direct court orders, to engage in bad faith charades in court, and to dare judges to do anything about it.

The case of Abrego Garcia — the El Salvadoran man wrongfully deported to his home country in March in violation of a immigration judge’s order — may be where the Trump administration has been most persistently defiant for the longest time. It’s refusal to correct its error and bring him back sparked a constitutional clash that landed at the Supreme Court, and it only brought him back after indicting him for unrelated crimes.

You don’t have to get too deep into the weeds to understand the significance of what happened today.

ALEXANDRIA, VA—This morning’s hearing on James Comey’s motion to dismiss for vindictive and selective prosecution was largely overshadowed by the revelation that the indictment may not be valid because it was botched by interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan. You can read my initial report from court here.

It would be an epic way for the weaponized prosecution of Comey to end: the Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience so badly mishandling the basic nuts and bolts of grand jury practice that no indictment ever attached to Comey.

But a botched indictment only indirectly gets at the heart of the bad faith and ill motive that is driving the Comey prosecution, so let’s run through some of the highlights of the nearly hour-long argument that preceded U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff pressing prosecutors for answers on their mishandling of the grand jury. Instead of recounting the arguments from both sides — former deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben for Comey and Nathaniel Lemons for the government — I want to zoom in on what most interested the judge and where his questions were most focused.