By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had her aide respond scornfully last month when a coalition of 70 lawyers, legal scholars and former judges asked the Florida Bar to investigate her for professional misconduct.
Chad Mizelle, Bondi’s chief of staff, mocked “out-of-state lawyers” trying to “weaponize the Bar complaint process” against his boss. Mizelle, like Bondi a Florida Bar member, said in a statement the coalition was showing “less intelligence – and independent thoughts – than sheep.”
Still, the nation’s top law enforcement officer finds herself fighting off “sheep” who think strategically. They‘re engaged in a protracted battle with enormous stakes in a Maryland courtroom.
Pam Bondi, a licensed Florida lawyer for 34 years and the state’s former attorney general, knew that state Bar staff had rejected two recent ethics complaints against her.
No surprise, then, that the staff dumped the third broadside one day after it was filed. The Bar announced June 6 it will not investigate Bondi for ethics violations because she’s a federal official.
The matter didn’t end there, however. Boca Raton criminal defense lawyer Jon May, author of the latest Bar complaint, is using Bondi’s alleged misconduct in a test of President Donald Trump’s historic immigrant purge: the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
“That was always my goal, to have an ethics complaint in Florida that could be presented to [Maryland U.S. District] Judge Paula Xinis in that case,” May told Florida Bulldog. “This whole thing is just beginning.”
ONE IMMIGRANT’S PLIGHT
Abrego Garcia is one of many immigrants the Trump regime is deporting without giving them a chance to prove or establish their legal right to live in this country.
In 2019, U.S. Immigration Judge David M. Jones granted the Maryland resident protection from being deported to his native El Salvador. The judge found “a credible threat” to Abrego Garcia’s life if he were sent back because, before he fled to the United States as a teenager in about 2011, the Barrio 18 criminal gang had tried to extort his family business and force him to join them, according to the Washington Post.
But in March, Trump’s immigration enforcers branded Abrego Garcia a gang member and shipped him and more than 260 other men to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Human rights groups report that inmates of the supermax prison are tortured routinely.
The case of Abrego Garcia, a construction worker and father of three, stands out because on April 10 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” his return. The high court rarely second-guesses Trump’s immigration policy.
Almost two months later, on June 6, Abrego Garcia was flown back to the U.S. He was taken not to Maryland but to Tennessee, where he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit human smuggling.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers call the new charge “preposterous.” Bondi said, “This is what American justice looks like.”
Soon after Abrego Garcia landed in El Salvador, his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, sued Bondi and immigration officials in Maryland federal court to force his return. Though he’s back in the country, the lawsuit before Judge Xinis continues on behalf of other immigrants in the same situation.
A document filed in the Maryland lawsuit describes Abrego Garcia’s mistreatment at CECOT. He was subjected to “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture,” it claims.
AG BONDI TAKES CHARGE
The Florida Bar Bondi complaint accuses the attorney general of ordering government lawyers to defend Abrego Garcia’s deportation not because it was legitimate but because it scored political points.
The day after Erez Reuveni, a veteran lawyer with DOJ’s Office of Immigration Litigation, admitted to Judge Xinis that Abrego Garcia “should not have been removed,” Reuveni was suspended; he was fired 10 days later.
His firing was foreshadowed by a memo Bondi issued on Feb. 5, her first day in office. It sets the expectation that DOJ attorneys “zealously advance, protect and defend their client’s interests.” That client, the memo makes clear, is President Trump.
The memo warns that “any attorney who because of their personal political views or judgments declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good-faith arguments on behalf of the Administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the Department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination.”
“Ms. Bondi has sent a message to all Justice Department lawyers that they must disregard the applicable Rules of Professional Conduct, fundamental ethical principles, and longstanding norms of the Department in order to zealously pursue the President’s political objectives – and, if they fail to do so, they will be disciplined or fired,” the Bar complaint states.
On June 18, Lawyers for the Rule of Law sent Xinis a similar complaint that calls for an investigation into the attorney general’s allegedly unethical conduct. The claims support the argument that Abrego Garcia was deported illegally.
May, a co-chair of the nonpartisan group’s amicus (friend of the court) committee, said Xinis referred the matter to her district court’s disciplinary committee. It’s already gone further than the Florida Bar complaint.
ANOTHER POLITICAL CASE
Jon May is known for his involvement during the Reagan administration in a highly complex and political case. He and Frank Rubino, his partner at the time, were among attorneys who represented Manuel Noriega, the deposed Panamanian dictator who had a complicated relationship with the CIA.
Noriega served 17 years in a Miami federal prison for drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering. When he completed his sentence in 2007, the government didn’t know where to send him.
May argued the Geneva Convention required sending Noriega, technically a prisoner of war, back to Panama. He was extradited to France and finally to Panama, where he was imprisoned before his death, at 83, in 2017.
Earlier this year May devised the strategy of filing a Bar complaint against Bondi. He said he persevered even after failing at his first attempts to recruit allies. For example, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers turned him down.
“It was very frustrating because I knew that the likelihood of retaliation against me was high, but I was determined to do this even if I could get no support from anyone,” May said.
Then two ethics scholars, from Georgetown and Hofstra universities, agreed to help and spread the word. Finally the group coalesced and took action.
Ethics investigations in New York, California and Washington, D.C. have resulted in the disbarments of former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others who conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Despite the Florida Bar’s quick rejection of his complaint, May said he remains optimistic about a Bondi investigation in her home state, stating:
“I’m still hopeful that if someone in good faith with the Florida Bar looks at this, they’ll realize that the entire justice system is in jeopardy as a result of the leadership telling attorneys working for the government, ‘We don’t care if you lie and you cheat and mislead judges and make allegations without evidence. Our policies come first before your obligations to the Bar.’ “
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