A judge on Friday ordered federal prosecutors to disclose whether they had an arrangement with James O’Keefe’s right-wing activist group Project Veritas to conceal the group’s identity in using secret recordings of protest-planning meetings before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The order represents the latest fallout from the decision by the US attorney’s office in Washington, DC, to use videos made by a Project Veritas operative in its prosecution of more than 200 people charged with rioting on Jan. 20, 2017. Twenty-one people pleaded guilty in the months immediately after the mass arrests, but the government failed to get any convictions and ended up dropping the remaining cases over the summer.

Litigation has pressed on over the government's handling of the Project Veritas recordings. While the government used some recordings from the right-wing group — which has frequently been found to selectively edit its videos — in Inauguration Day cases that went to trial, a judge later found that prosecutors were wrong not to disclose an additional cache of videos and audio recordings in their possession. The judge also ruled that prosecutors violated evidence disclosure rules in not revealing video edits that the government made.

Prosecutors and a group of defense lawyers were in DC Superior Court on Friday as the government argued that Chief Judge Robert Morin should find there was no “intentional misrepresentation” by the government about its decision not to tell the defense or the judge about the additional recordings.

A judge's finding that a prosecutor committed misconduct could have consequences beyond the underlying case. Former defendants have encouraged each other to file ethics complaints against the lead prosecutor, Assistant US Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff, with the DC Bar. Defense lawyer Mark Sweet said during Friday’s hearing that Morin’s decision could be relevant in any defense effort to have the government cover its legal fees.

David Goodhand, a senior counsel in the US attorney’s office, told the judge that they were pursuing the issue even though the prosecution was over because any allegation of misconduct was something his office took seriously.

“It’s a very serious suggestion,” Goodhand said. Later in the hearing, he said the government didn’t “want that to exist on the record and lay latent.”

Defense lawyers also complained that the government originally didn’t disclose Project Veritas as the source of the recordings, and that the defense lawyers had to piece together the connection through their own research. Speaking at Friday’s hearing, Elizabeth Lagesse, one of the defendants whose case was dropped, questioned whether the secrecy surrounding the videos was the result of an arrangement between the government and Project Veritas.

The judge then asked Goodhand if there was any agreement to keep Project Veritas’s identity secret. Goodhand said he didn’t know. Morin ordered him to file a supplement to the government’s court papers with an answer.

Asked if there was an agreement with the US attorney's office, a spokesperson for Project Veritas said in an email to BuzzFeed News, "We fully cooperated with the investigation."

A total of 212 people were indicted in connection with the protests on Inauguration Day. The demonstration had been advertised as an “anti-capitalist” and “anti-fascist” march and turned violent at times, with participants breaking windows of storefronts downtown. The government estimated more than $100,000 in property damage. Many defendants argued the violence was limited to a few people and that most of the group was participating in First Amendment–protected political speech, not criminal activity.

The first six defendants to stand trial were acquitted in December. Prosecutors then dismissed 129 cases, saying they were going to focus on the most serious cases. A second trial ended with the acquittal of one defendant and the jury acquitting or deadlocking on charges against the other three defendants in that group. Before announcing that it was dropping the cases entirely, the government dismissed 13 cases while it dealt with the Project Veritas–related complaints.

The US attorney’s office announced on July 6 that it was dismissing the final 39 cases that were still waiting to go to trial.