Maybe before Obama sets his attack dogs with the Department of (social) Justice on states that oppose his radical redefinition of gender and privacy, he should clean up the mess within that department, first?

In what is a delicious footnote to the troublesome, gestapo tactics of this administration and the DOJ, a federal judge has ordered annual ethics classes for Justice Department lawyers, due to what was deemed as “intentionally deceptive” behavior during litigation over the president’s executive orders on immigration.

Annual ethics classes, as in… they’re so dirty they have to have regular reminders on how to do their job without being lying, cheating, frauds.

Ok, admittedly, that last bit was my personal spin and probably not the way a federal judge would frame it, but I wasn’t far off.

From the Washington Examiner:

“’Such conduct is certainly not worthy of any department whose name includes the word ‘Justice,’” U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen wrote in a withering order released Thursday. Justice Department attorneys misled the court about when the Department of Homeland Security would begin implementing President Obama’s executive order granting ‘deferred action’ to illegal immigrants whose children are citizens. In doing so, they tricked the 26 states who filed a lawsuit into ‘foregoing a request for a temporary restraining order,’ according to the judge.”

Hanen went on to point out that the DOJ admitted to making false statements.

“As punishment, Justice Department attorneys who wish to appear in any state or federal court within the 26 states that brought the lawsuit have to undergo annual ethics training. ‘At a minimum, this course (or courses) shall total at least three hours of ethics training per year,’ he wrote. In another case, such ‘egregious conduct’ would lead him to strike the government’s pleadings, but Hanen decided not to take that step because the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case in April.”

The core of the case involves Justice Department attorneys stating that a Department of Homeland Security directive that had been announced in November 2014 would not go into effect until February 2015. Meanwhile, these same attorneys were aware that certain portions of the DACA (deferred action for childhood arrivals) policy of 2012 were already being implemented by the DHS.

“’Apparently, lawyers, somewhere in the halls of the Justice Department whose identities are unknown to this court, decided unilaterally that the conduct of the DHS in granting three-year DACA renewals using the 2014 DHS directive was immaterial and irrelevant to this lawsuit and that the DOJ could therefore just ignore it,’ Hanen wrote. ‘Then, for whatever reason, the Justice Department trial lawyers appearing in this Court chose not to tell the truth about this DHS activity. The first decision was certainly unsupportable, but the subsequent decision to hide it from the Court was unethical.’”

He doesn’t sound happy. In fact, he would have preferred to disbar the attorney’s involved, entirely. Although that wasn’t in his power to do, it was in his power to disbar them from practicing in Texas, and that he did.

“’The court does not have the power to disbar the counsel in this case, but it does have the power to revoke the pro hac vice status of out-of-state lawyers who act unethically in court,’ he wrote. ‘By a separate sealed order that it is simultaneously issuing, that is being done.’”

Maybe when this has settled in, somebody should give a closer look to other areas where this DOJ has felt necessary to exert themselves.