With a few notable exceptions, grieving unethical prosecutors has been a fool’s errand. It’s not that they haven’t done things to violate the rules of professional responsibility and worthy of discipline, but neither judges nor disciplinary committees have shown the fortitude to take them to task for their failings. Is that about to change?

A legal watchdog group accused three Justice Department lawyers of professional misconduct on Thursday, saying they had made false statements to a federal judge in a high-profile case challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

It’s bad enough that long-time former AUSA Erez Reuveni spilled the beans on Emil Bove, then number 3 at Justice and now Hizzoner, instructing lawyers to refuse to comply with court orders, offering a simple “fuck you” if necessary. But for the three assistants involved in the CFPB challenge, the representations to the court fly in the face of documentary evidence that they lied through their teeth.

The bar complaints against the three lawyers — Eric J. Hamilton, Brad P. Rosenberg and Liam C. Holland — came at an extraordinary moment of tension between the Justice Department and many of the federal judges who have been hearing challenges to President Trump’s policies.

According to the complaints, Mr. Hamilton and his two colleagues misled Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was handling the case, by telling her in a written filing that the administration had never sought to shut down the agency, but had merely closed its headquarters building and “tightened staff supervision.” That assertion was ultimately shown to have flown in the face of internal emails written by Russell T. Vought, the acting director of the C.F.P.B., who had ordered its staff to stop doing any work at all.

All lawyers, including those working for Trump’s Department of Justice, have a duty of  candor to the court. Basically. you just can’t lie to a judge. Not even when you work for the DoJ. Not even when your superior at the DoJ tells you to lie. So what’s different now, you might wonder, given that lying to judges was hardly unknown in the past, even if it wasn’t exactly commonplace either?

Judges across the country have repeatedly called out department lawyers for violating their orders and even for destroying the bonds of trust that the government has traditionally been afforded when its representatives appear in court. The administration and its allies have often responded with lacerating verbal attacks, including threats of impeachment.

Judges have historically cut the DoJ a break, accepting the premise that it was serving the public good and its lawyers were presumptively credible. Even if AUSAs fudged the truth, it was not done malevolently. While many of us from the other table found this offensive, counterproductive and very wrong, it remained the general view of judges toward government lawyers.

But now that the contumacious conduct, from lying to refusing to comply with orders, is becoming endemic, there has been a significant shift in the judiciary toward Bondi’s babies. And Attorney General Pam Bondi has gone  on the attack.

Just this week, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on social media that the department had filed its own misconduct complaint against Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of Federal District Court in Washington who has handled several prominent cases involving Mr. Trump.

The complaint accused Judge Boasberg of having told attendees at a recent judicial conference — among them, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — that he was concerned the Trump administration would “disregard rulings of federal courts” and trigger “a constitutional crisis.”

This came after Judge Boasberg, about whom Trump had few kind words, “declared from the bench  that he might lodge misconduct accusations against department lawyers” for violating his order to turn around the airplanes to El Salvador last March. Of course, this was all known last March, and here we are in August with nothing having happened. Forget triggering a constitutional crisis. That plane has left United States airspace, your honor.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, before whom the three AUSAs lied, expressed her loss of faith in the candor of the government.

“The court is left with little confidence that the defense can be trusted to tell the truth about anything,” she wrote.

Of course, Judge Jackson didn’t actually do anything about it. Judge Boasberg said some words about it, but nothing else. Will the grievances filed by the Legal Accountability Center against the three AUSAs go anywhere? Historically, the answer is probably not. Based on the actions of judges who have been lied to and whose orders have been ignored, probably not. But maybe, just maybe, someone will show the guts to hold Trump’s AUSAs to their duty of candor this time, as the traditional judicial shrugging over unethical conduct by government lawyers may have finally worn out its welcome.