Florida Bar complaint accuses Bondi of ‘misconduct' as U.S. Attorney General

Miami Herald

a day ago

During her Senate confirmation hearing for U.S. Attorney General, Pam Bondi tip-toed around whether she would stand up to President Donald Trump's pressure on the Justice Department, promising only in a broad sense that 'politics has to be taken out of this system.'
Since her confirmation in February, Bondi has earned the praise of conservative Republicans for loyally following Trump's agenda while drawing the wrath of critics on the Democratic spectrum who say she has politicized the Justice Department on issues ranging from illegal immigration to public corruption.
Now, a liberal- and moderate-leaning coalition of about 70 law professors, attorneys and former Florida Supreme Court justices is attacking Bondi's record in an ethics complaint filed on Thursday with the Florida Bar. They accuse Bondi 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, which includes retired Florida Supreme Court justices Barbara J. Pariente, Peggy A. Quince and James Perry, noted that the Florida Bar rejected two other recent ethics complaints against Bondi, saying it 'does not investigate or prosecute sitting officers appointed under the U.S. Constitution while they are in office.'
But the coalition countered that 'the Florida Bar's dismissal is unsupported by history or precedent,' arguing none of its rules exempt a Florida-licensed lawyer from scrutiny who is accused of abusing her position as a federal public official.
Justice Department officials condemned the latest Florida Bar complaint.
'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 on Thursday. 'This third vexatious attempt will fail to do anything other than prove that the signatories have less intelligence —and independent thoughts — than sheep.'
Bondi's role in firings
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.' The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the judge's order directing the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Garcia's release, but he's still imprisoned in El Salvador.
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.
'Zealous advocacy'
According to the Florida Bar 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.
Jon May, a longtime South Florida criminal defense attorney who represented Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in his drug-trafficking case in Miami, said he and others who authored the Florida Bar complaint believe 'zealous advocacy operates within the rules of ethics, not outside them.'
'But the Attorney General wrongly demands government lawyers abandon their ethical obligations and advance the Administration's agenda no matter the cost to the rule of law,' May said.
'Since her first day on the job, Pam Bondi has made clear that she plans to use the Department of Justice for political pursuits, and she has done just that,' 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.
Trump's executive power
While the Florida Bar complaint focuses on three examples of Bondi's alleged ethical misconduct, it does not capture Trump's latest executive order instructing his White House counsel and the attorney general to investigate former President Biden and his staff.
In his order issued on Wednesday, Trump instructed them to examine whether some of Biden's presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge — an 'attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor,' according to The New York Times.
Nor does the Florida Bar complaint mention perhaps the most politically charged actions taken by the Justice Department in the week after Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20 for a second term as president. Acting Attorney General James McHenry, Bondi's temporary predecessor, fired more than a dozen career prosecutors in the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami who had worked on the classified documents case or the election-interference case arising from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — both brought against Trump by the former special counsel, Jack Smith, during the Biden presidency.
The firings by Trump's Justice Department conjured up then-President Richard Nixon's controversial move to have special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired because he refused to withdraw a subpoena for the Nixon White House tapes during the Watergate investigation.
In what became known as the 'Saturday Night Massacre,' Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox, but Richardson refused and resigned. Then, the president ordered the AG's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, to fire Cox. He also refused and resigned.
Nixon finally prevailed when he ordered the Justice Department's solicitor general, Robert Bork, to terminate Cox — a move that backfired on Nixon and ultimately led to his resignation as president in 1974. In the aftermath, it was generally understood there would be 'no contact' between the president and the attorney general regarding investigations and prosecutions.
But after more than 50 years, the Justice Department's wall of independence from the White House was officially torn down in July 2024.
In an historic 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that former President Trump was generally immune from criminal liability for his official acts — including his attempts to use the Justice Department to obstruct the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden.
The court's conservative majority found that 'the President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to 'take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed' ' under Article II of the Constitution.
Bondi pledges Justice Department won't be weaponized
During her Senate confirmation hearing in mid-January, Bondi said she would keep politics out of the Justice Department — despite refusing to say that Trump lost the 2020 election and previously saying 'prosecutors will be prosecuted.'
'The partisanship, the weaponization, will be gone,' Bondi testified, while repeatedly saying the Justice Department had been misused under the Biden administration. 'America will have one tier of justice for all.'
In her Feb. 5 'Zealous Advocacy' memo to all Justice Department employees, Bondi advised prosecutors that their responsibilities 'include not only aggressively enforcing criminal and civil laws enacted by Congress but also vigorously defending presidential policies and actions against legal challenges on behalf of the United States.'
But then Bondi said: 'The discretion afforded Department attorneys entrusted with those responsibilities does not include latitude to substitute personal political views or judgments for those that prevailed in the election.'
She concluded by warning that anyone who 'refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration ... or impedes the Department's mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination.'