Legal group urges state Supreme Court to order Florida Bar to investigate Bondi

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4 days ago

Snubbed by The Florida Bar last month, about 70 liberal-leaning scholars, attorneys and former judges have asked the state Supreme Court to order the Bar to investigate their complaint claiming U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi violated Florida's ethics rules as the nation's top law enforcement official.
The coalition's legal argument in a petition filed on Tuesday may be compelling, but it's a long shot given the fact that the seven justices on Florida's high court were all appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and former GOP Gov. Charlie Crist.
In June, the group filed an ethics complaint against Bondi with The Florida Bar, but the Bar rejected it on jurisdictional grounds, saying in a formal response that it 'does not investigate or prosecute sitting officers appointed under the U.S. Constitution while they are in office.'
READ MORE: Group accuses Bondi of 'misconduct' as Attorney General; Florida Bar rejects complaint
However, in their petition to the Florida Supreme Court, the coalition challenged that assertion, noting that in 1998 Congress passed the McDade Amendment, which explicitly rejected The Florida Bar's argument that investigating federal officials would encroach on federal authority. The McDade Amendment states: 'Attorneys for the [U.S.] Government shall be subject to State laws and rules ... to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.'
In their petition filed with the Florida Supreme Court, the coalition preemptively confronts the likely criticism that their legal bid to have The Florida Bar investigate Bondi — who has aggressively carried out the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, elite universities and law firms — amounts to political grandstanding.
'Some have criticized ethics complaints against public officials as being 'politics,' or a vehicle for adjudicating policy disputes,' said the petition, which was filed by seasoned South Florida criminal defense attorney Jon May.
'As a review of the complaint will make clear, however, its aim is to assure that lawyers who occupy positions of public trust continue to abide by the Rules of Professional Conduct that they are obliged to follow,' said May, who represented Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in his drug-trafficking case in Miami. 'The long list of signatories to the complaint, many of whom are distinguished professors of legal ethics, vindicates that intent.'
On Tuesday, The Florida Bar did not respond to a Miami Herald request for comment.
'The Florida Bar has this view that the Attorney General is too busy to be bothered with an ethics complaint,' said Jamie Conrad, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney with Lawyers Defending American Democracy, which helped author the complaint and petition. 'We think it's just the opposite.
'She, of all people, has to set an example for the government and the rest of the country,' Conrad told the Miami Herald. 'But she and her team are being allowed to operate in an ethics-free zone and that's a very dangerous situation for the country.'
The coalition, which includes retired Florida Supreme Court justices Barbara J. Pariente and Peggy A. Quince, took aim at Bondi in their complaint filed on June 5 with The Florida Bar. Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles appointed Pariente to the Court in 1997 while Chiles and Republican Jeb Bush, then governor-elect, jointly appointed Quince.
The coalition's complaint accuses Bondi, a Florida Bar member, of violating her ethical duties as U.S. Attorney General, saying she has committed 'serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice.'
The complaint claims Bondi 'has sought to compel Department of Justice lawyers to violate their ethical obligations under the guise of 'zealous advocacy' ' that she espoused in a Feb. 5 memo to all agency employees on her first day in office.
The complaint further says Bondi threatened agency lawyers with discipline or termination if they failed 'to zealously pursue the President's political objectives,' alleging her conduct violates Florida Bar rules and longstanding norms of the Justice Department.
The coalition noted that The Florida Bar rejected two other recent ethics complaints against Bondi filed, respectively, by two California congressmen and a California lawyer. The Bar's lawyers cited a jurisdictional issue in those prior instances, too.
At the time, the Department of Justice, speaking on behalf of Bondi, condemned these collective efforts, saying they were trying to 'weaponize' a complaint using The Florida Bar to attack the U.S. Attorney General.
'The Florida Bar has twice rejected performative attempts by these out-of-state lawyers to weaponize the bar complaint process against AG Bondi,' Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle said in a statement provided to the Miami Herald. 'This third vexatious attempt will fail to do anything other than prove that the signatories have less intelligence —and independent thoughts — than sheep.'
The coalition's complaint accuses Bondi — the 59-year-old former Florida Attorney General and State Attorney in the Tampa area — of playing a central role in the improper firings and resignations of numerous government lawyers during her four-month span at the helm of the Justice Department. Three examples are cited in the complaint:
▪ In mid-April, Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche fired a seasoned immigration lawyer who the Trump administration accused of sabotaging its legal case over the mistaken deportation of a Maryland man to his native El Salvador.
Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni argued the government's case in the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was sent to a Salvadoran mega prison in March due to an 'administrative error,' despite an immigration court order that he not be removed from the United States.
Reuveni was initially placed on administrative leave days after informing a federal judge: 'Our only arguments are jurisdictional. … He should not have been sent to El Salvador.' In April, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the judge's order directing the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release.
Abrego Garcia, who had not been charged with a crime despite being accused by the Trump administration of belonging to the notorious MS-13 gang, remained in the Salvadoran prison for nearly three months. But in late May, Bondi announced that Abrego Garcia was flown back to United States and charged in a new federal indictment, accusing him of conspiring to transport undocumented migrants within the country who had crossed the southern border illegally.
'Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,' Bondi said at a news conference in Washington. 'He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. ... This is what American justice looks like.'
After his return, the coalition that filed the ethics complaint that was rejected by The Florida Bar also submitted a similar one with the federal district court in Maryland, where Abrego Garcia's immigration case was reviewed.
Reuveni filed a whistle-blower claim with the U.S. Senate in June.
'The Department of Justice is thumbing its nose at the courts, and putting Justice Department attorneys in an impossible position where they have to choose between loyalty to the agenda of the president and their duty to the court,' Reuveni told the New York Times in an interview last week.
Bondi denied his account on social media: 'This disgruntled employee is not a whistle-blower — he's a leaker asserting false claims seeking five minutes of fame.'
Last Friday, Bondi also fired her personal ethics adviser, removing the Justice Department's top official responsible for counseling the most senior political appointees, according to published reports. Joseph Tirrell, a career attorney who'd spent nearly 20 years at the department, received a termination letter from Bondi.
READ MORE: Judge orders Trump administration to bring Venezuelans back from El Salvador prison
▪ In mid-February, a longtime federal prosecutor resigned rather than carry out what she described as orders from Trump-appointed officials to pursue enforcement actions unsupported by evidence, according to a copy of her resignation letter.
Denise Cheung, who was the head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, wrote in her resignation letter to interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin that she had 'always sought to offer sound and ethical counsel' and that she had been asked to take investigative and law enforcement actions despite what she called the lack of 'sufficient evidence.'
Cheung wrote that she was asked to review documentation provided by the Office of the Deputy Attorney General 'to open a criminal investigation into whether a contract had been unlawfully awarded by an executive agency.' The contract was reportedly granted by the Environmental Protection Agency during President Joe Biden's administration.
▪ Earlier in February, several senior federal prosecutors in New York and Washington resigned after they refused to follow a Justice Department order to drop the corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams. They resigned after Emil Bove, the acting U.S. deputy attorney general, issued a Feb. 10 memo ordering federal prosecutors in New York to dismiss the case against Adams, saying it hampered the mayor's ability to tackle 'illegal immigration and violent crime.'
Danielle R. Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned one day after appealing to Bondi. Sassoon said she attended a meeting on Jan. 31 with Bove, Adams' attorneys and members of her office. 'Adams's attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department's enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed,' Sassoon wrote on Feb. 12.
According to the coalition's 23-page complaint, Bondi's 'principal ethical violation arises from her perversion of the concept of 'zealous advocacy' into an overriding campaign, individually and through Messrs. Blanche, Bove and Martin, to coerce and intimidate the lawyers they supervise into violating their ethical obligations.'
In each of the three examples, Bondi and her senior team 'ordered Department lawyers to do things those lawyers were ethically forbidden from doing, under threat of suspension or termination—or fired them for not having done so,' the complaint says.
May, who helped write The Florida Bar complaint, said he believes 'zealous advocacy operates within the rules of ethics, not outside them.'
Others in the coalition agreed.
'The Florida Bar has a responsibility to hold Bondi — and every lawyer under its purview who is implicated in her conduct — to account for actions that threaten the rule of law and the administration of justice,' said Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit legal advocacy group in Washington, D.C. Eisen is the former ambassador to the Czech Republic during the Obama administration.