This is no doubt between the judge and the FBI. Most of the Judges dont particularly understand the digital nuances of the warrants they are authorizing or the orders they're being given. I have zero doubts that the feds walked in and said "APPLE is not allowing us to brute force the device, APPLE is forcing the device to self-destruct". They are, i mean, they're configurable options, but written in such a way to not allow any bypassing including by Apple themselves (probably glossed over). Any technically competent judge would knows that key escrow and backdoors have a risk of being leaked. This would be the same court to scream bloody murder if iOS devices with their SSN, PII were breached due to weak crypto controls.
But wait, according to the article:
So thats a complete fail on them. The MDM solution used by the dept should be able to change the pin in a jiffy, thats sort of why we have MDM. If they didn't do their part in managing their devices adequately, its not Apples fault.