RACHEL MADDOW: What I was actually warning about this time last week was the collapse that has now apparently started of Trump’s marquee, headline revenge prosecutions of his supposed political enemies. Headline, New York Times, “Judge says Trump Justice Department may have committed misconduct in James Comey case.”

Quote, “A federal magistrate judge said today that the criminal case against James Comey, the former FBI director, could be in trouble because of a series of apparent errors committed in front of the grand jury by Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced prosecutor picked by President Trump to oversee the matter.” The judge’s statement is what The Times describes as a, quote, “remarkable rebuke of Lindsey Halligan.

Headline of what remains of The Washington Post tonight on the same — on the same subject, quote, “Federal judge blasts potential government misconduct in Comey case.” And indeed, the judge’s ruling really is blistering. It accuses the Justice Department of illegally, quote, “rummaging through evidence,” of, quote, “inexplicably failing to obtain proper search warrants,” of putting an FBI agent before the grand jury in a way that was, quote, “highly irregular.”

Worst of all, the judge’s ruling accuses Lindsey Halligan herself of making, quote, “fundamental and highly prejudicial misstatements of the law to the grand jury.” The judge describing a, quote, “disturbing pattern of profound missteps,” quote, “The court finds that the government’s actions in this case, whether purposeful, reckless, or negligent, raised genuine issues of misconduct.” That’s not going very well.

And, oops, that finding from that judge in the Comey case came today immediately before New York Democratic Attorney General Tish James was due, also in the same court, to file her own motion to dismiss the prosecution that’s been brought against her. Quote, “This indictment is the product of months of illegal and unethical behavior by government officials, only made possible by the misuse of a federal agency, the disregard of exculpatory evidence, the systematic removal of ethics officials and career prosecutors who stood in the way, and the improper attempt to install an unqualified U.S. attorney with nothing to offer except undying loyalty.

If this brazen, continuous disregard for the law and the Constitution is not outrageous government conduct, nothing is.” From the motion to dismiss. And that, of course, follows new reporting in the Wall Street Journal that the Trump appointee who crusaded to bring this case against Tish James, his name is Bill Pulte at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, this new reporting in the Wall Street Journal that he reportedly had to fire his way through basically all the oversight and ethics officials at his own agency because they were looking into whether he was breaking the law, whether he was acting improperly in accessing information about Tish James to try to gin up this case. If this is not outrageous government conduct, nothing is.

So — so that’s all of that blowing up all at once. And you could see it coming, right? You could see it coming from like the way the two sides were arrayed each other there — against each other there, right? With James Comey and Tish James and the real lawyers who they brought in to defend them against the clown car that the Trump administration has made of the U.S. Department of Justice.

And I will tell you, this is a consequential thing. It’s not just like point and laugh, although it is point and laugh, it’s consequential. They’re shambolic and terrible, irretrievably D-list lawyering. Their failure to get even the basic stuff right when it comes to the legality of what they’re trying to do turns out to be a compounding problem for them.

Because when they take actions against their perceived enemies, or they take actions to try to advance the president’s radical agenda, or they take actions to fire people they’re not allowed to fire, or to close agencies they’re not allowed to close, or to do things they’re just not allowed to do, they inevitably get challenged. And when they get challenged, almost all the time they lose.