By Noreen Marcus, Florida Bulldog.org
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is poised to take a Florida Bar rule that protects Attorney General Pam Bondi from professional sanctions and retool it to immunize the roughly 10,000 lawyers who work for her.
DOJ is floating a regulation that would prevent state Bar regulators from investigating complaints against federal prosecutors until after the attorney general finishes reviewing them. There’s no time limit, so complaints could be bottled up indefinitely.
The proposal appears to be modeled after a Florida Supreme Court rule that allows Bondi to get away with not facing accountability for allegedly defying professional standards without suffering harm to her legal career.
Bondi has breezed past the botched Epstein files rollout, a chorus of judges rebuking her underlings, an ethics audit in Maryland, and an outraged response to her hostile performance in Congress last month.
One of the main obstacles to holding the nation’s top prosecutor accountable is the Florida Supreme Court. The court rewrote its own rule to protect incumbents from Bar oversight when Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, at that time Florida attorney general, challenged President Biden’s 2020 election. Bondi preceded Moody as state attorney general from 2011 to 2019.
The rule makes the 60-year-old Bondi, a Florida lawyer for 35 years, untouchable at least until she leaves office.
“Nothing will happen to Bondi,” said Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie.
“She has nothing to fear from the Florida Bar or the Florida Supreme Court. The Bar is not interested in going after political figures and the court is too right-wing to act against a Trump official,” he said.
And if Attorney General Bondi wasn’t allowed to practice law again, so what? During President Trump’s first term, she consulted with Qatar and other Ballard Partner clients when she wasn’t defending Trump at his first impeachment trial.
“She could still work as a commentator or consultant, or serve on a board of directors, if she decided to work at all, and losing her license would make her even more of a martyr to the right,” Jarvis said. “Plus I assume that she’ll write a book and get a healthy advance.”
Last June the Florida Bar, the Supreme Court’s disciplinary agency, rejected a third call to investigate Bondi’s compliance with lawyer regulations. This request came from a 70-person coalition of legal scholars, retired Florida Supreme Court justices and former judges from across the nation, brought together by the nonprofit Lawyers for the Rule of Law.
“This is just another Trump administration effort to create another law free zone,” said Stephen Hanlon, a St. Louis, MO attorney who signed the coalition’s complaint. “Candidly, I don’t know what they are afraid of. Most bar disciplinary bodies have failed to investigate and discipline almost all lawyer facilitated corporate and governmental criminal schemes. We have largely forfeited our claim to be a self regulating profession.”
“Ms. Bondi has launched a concerted effort to override ethical obligations whenever they stand in the way of achieving her and her superior’s [Trump’s] political goals. This conduct is deeply prejudicial to the rule of law and the administration of justice, as well as a violation of her own ethical obligations,” Boca Raton criminal defense lawyer Jon May wrote for the coalition.
Bondi ridiculed the complaint, calling it a “performative” and “vexatious” act of “political vigilantism.” It took the Florida Bar exactly one day to dispose of the matter, citing the office-holder protection rule.
MARYLAND BONDI INVESTIGATION
Then May pivoted to Maryland federal court, targeted Bondi’s role in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia immigration case, and got some traction. Presiding U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis referred the coalition complaint to her court’s disciplinary committee, where it apparently remains under investigation.
In the Abrego Garcia case, Bondi fired prosecutor Erez Reuveni after he admitted to Judge Xinis that immigration agents mistakenly flew the Maryland construction worker to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). The Bondi complaint alleges Reuveni’s firing was retaliatory.
“It’s not terribly unusual for these things to take a while,” said a Maryland lawyer who requested anonymity because he defends lawyers in Maryland disciplinary proceedings.
If the investigation has already ended with no finding of misconduct, “I can’t believe Bondi wouldn’t put out a press release saying, ‘I’ve been exonerated, I’ve been vindicated,’ “ the lawyer said.
Or, if the investigation revealed misconduct, the Maryland court would report to Florida, the only state that can suspend or yank Bondi’s license to practice law.
Recent events suggest Florida Bar authorities would show the Maryland report little more respect than Bondi gave House members who grilled her about the Epstein files at last month’s hearing. She hurled personal insults at them and wouldn’t even look at Epstein survivors when asked to acknowledge their presence in the room.
“As a lawyer and a woman, I was embarrassed by her conduct” at the hearing, retired Florida Supreme Court justice Barbara Pariente said in an interview with Stet News. Pariente was a signer of the Bondi coalition complaint.
In February the Florida Bar told Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit with a complaint against second-year Florida lawyer Lindsey Halligan, that the Bar was investigating her stint as a Bondi employee. Halligan was briefly the U.S. Attorney in Virginia until she bungled the prosecutions of two prominent Trump critics, former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Right after the Halligan story went viral, Bar spokeswoman Jennifer Krell Davis released a statement disavowing any such investigation. Then Bondi posted this on X: “The ‘investigation’ of Lindsey Halligan is totally fake news.”
POLITICS OF BAR DISCIPLINE
If Attorney General Bondi has her way, all DOJ lawyers will receive the same immunity from state Bar discipline that she enjoys courtesy of the Florida Supreme Court. A proposed DOJ regulation would curb states’ traditional authority to supervise all the lawyers they license.
That’s because the attorney general would have the right of first review for ethics complaints naming DOJ lawyers. Only when this open-ended process runs its course would the lawyer’s home state be able to “take whatever action it deems appropriate.”
“Experience with government agencies demonstrates that if there is a will to prevent anything from being done, there is a way to ensure that nothing is done,” Jon May wrote in a March 10 analysis of the DOJ regulation.
“This is not just a technical change; it is the creation of a ‘super-class’ of lawyers who are no longer officers of the court, but solely instruments of the Executive Branch,” May wrote.
According to the DOJ, the new rule is designed to remove politics from the lawyer disciplinary process. But that ship sailed long ago.
For five years politics has propelled the Florida Bar’s case against Santa Rosa Beach lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder. He incited Gov. Ron DeSantis’s wrath when he contested the governor’s pandemic policies – by walking public beaches dressed as the Grim Reaper and by suing DeSantis.
The Bar has taken two swipes at punishing Uhlfelder for what his supporters deem non-existent or technical errors. In December the referee who heard the Bar’s latest charges recommended the mildest possible sanction: admonishment.
At that point the Bar was arguing for a 91-day suspension that would force Uhlfelder to reapply for his law license. Public outcry followed, with the Orlando Sentinel editorializing that his misstep is “the moral equivalent of jaywalking.”
On March 6 the Bar filed an appeal in the Supreme Court seeking a briefer, 10-day suspension. But Uhlfelder is expected to maintain he did nothing wrong and shouldn’t be punished. Period.
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