We feel two different ways about a federal judge blasting senior Trump administration officials on Monday for lying so much to the public. On the one hand, that’s obviously great. Everybody in this administration from the president on down lies just about every time they open their mouths, and it’s nice to see some accountability. On the other hand, the judge’s scathing comments show that the parts of the judicial system that are still working on behalf of the American people and the Constitution, i.e., those not involving the Supreme Court, are doing so at an agonizingly slow pace.

The current case is an excellent example.

It involves untrue and incendiary statements that Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Barbie Kristi Noem have made about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the Trump administration illegally shipped to El Salvador, then falsely claimed they couldn’t get back, and then did bring back just to face human smuggling charges in a case that, like so many of the politically charged prosecutions we have seen in recent months, has some issues.

Before Americans could see with their own eyes what happens when you let heavily armed masked goons loose on undocumented and documented immigrants alike (with a few dozen Americans rounded up as well), Abrego Garcia was the face of a mass deportation program gone wrong.

His case showed that there were no checks on ICE, there was no due process for brown people being snatched off the streets, there was a pronounced recalcitrance on the part of the Trump administration to follow the law and obey court orders, and nobody in the government seemed to ever say the whole truth… whether that was in public or in the courts.

And, maddeningly, none of this was a secret.

Anybody who was paying even a modicum of attention could see what was happening here (and we have reported on these lies extensively).

Embarrassed by having made a mistake, the Trump administration tried to make Abrego Garcia look like the world’s foremost supervillain. Of course, that shouldn’t even matter because this case was never about whether he is a great guy and only whether he was afforded his right to due process.

That’s the beauty and the brilliance of the US judicial system. Everybody, even the worst criminals and serial offenders, gets their day in court. And, not to mention the obvious, that’s the only reason Trump himself wasn’t locked up for fraud, obstruction of justice, staging a coup, sparking an insurrection, falsifying business records, and hoarding classified documents.

Abrego Garcia clearly never got his day in court.

What he got instead was a concerted campaign from top administration officials to make him out to be a child molesting terrorist in order to justify an illegal deportation.

Mind you, after they brought Abrego Garcia back to the US, DOJ could have charged him with those crimes but instead settled for the low-level offense of “human smuggling” while relying on witnesses who got sweetheart deals in order to make even those charges stick.

Again, all of this happened in the open. The actions of the likes of Bondi and Noem were blatant and they were gross.

Therefore, it is nice to see that a judge finally called them out for their behavior.

In a decision that did not mince words, US Circuit Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw stated that Noem and Bondi had violated a local rule, which is intended to ensure that defendants can get a fair trial, that limits what government officials can say about pending cases.

“Government employees have made extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” wrote Crenshaw. “These statements made allegations regarding Abrego’s ‘character or reputation’ and expressed government officials’ views on Abrego’s ‘guilt or innocence.’”

That is unquestioningly true, as we have documented over and over.

Unfortunately, all Crenshaw did in his decision was to order Bondi and Noem to remind everybody at their respective departments of this rule.

We wish that he had chosen much harsher penalties because, unless they and their compatriots feel real consequences for their actions, it seems unlikely that their behavior will change.