Oh perfect.

Unfortunately I don’t have a YouTube clip of someone singing, “Our laws are in the very best of hands.” This is indefensible.

An Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina, Rudy Renfer, was caught red-handed submitting a court filing containing fabricated quotes, misstated case law, and even fake regulatory language. Magistrate Judge Robert T. Numbers II issued an order after being alerted to made-up quotations and misstatements of case holdings in the government’s submissions. The court said it had uncovered multiple defective cites to case law and at least two invented quotations attributed to the Code of Federal Regulations: these were not mere typos.

Renfer told the court he had accidentally filed an unfinalized draft. Judge Robert Numbers, however, said both the accuracy of the brief and the Renfer’s excuse were dubious. The issue became whether a government lawyer could be trusted to explain how his brief was prepared.

Judge Numbers ordered senior leaders from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the E.D.N.C. to appear at a show cause hearing, warning that the office itself could be sanctioned unless it could prove this was a single breakdown, not the result of chronic supervision failures.

Of course it was the result of supervision failures, because the Justice Department is incompetently run, has hired too many inexperienced lawyers, and obviously isn’t training the legal staff properly, including in the matter of legal ethics.

At the show‑cause hearing, Renfer told Judge Numbers that after feeling like he had botched a draft, he “felt panicked” and had an AI bot rewrite the brief, then filed it “believing he had reviewed it.”

Give me a break. How do you “believe you had reviewed” a court document when you haven’t? I can’t even make that claim when I post a typo-filled essay on Ethics Alarms. The peril of not sufficiently reviewing something you submit to a court under the implied guarantee that it is truthful and accurate is Professionalism 101, and doing so when you have used artificial intelligence to generate content is a clear ethics violation.

Renfer said the decision to use AI was the worst of his career. Ya think? It isn’t as if these episodes of AI hallucinating cases haven’t been well-publicized, especially in legal publications. I’ve been teaching lawyers about the problem since the summer of 2024! There are websites that track these episodes, but never before has a Justice Department lawyer been so unethical and incompetent as to be caught engaging in such misconduct. Government lawyers are supposed to be governed by higher standards. This was the standard of a desperate DEI-admitted first-year law student.