By Noreen Marcus, FloridaBulldog.org
Florida Bar ethics reviewers aren’t likely to take direction from a federal judge and discipline Alejandro Brito, President Trump’s personal lawyer in the case of Trump v. IRS.
Miami U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams provided ample evidence of misconduct in her blockbuster July 13 ruling denouncing Brito and other players in the IRS case that sought $10 billion in damages. She’s the second South Florida federal judge to refer a Trump lawyer to the Florida Bar; the first referral, by U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, was a non-starter.
Coral Gables-based Brito, a Florida lawyer for 30 years, is one of Trump’s most prolific media attackers. He’s known for suing ABC News, The Wall Street Journal and others the president deems hostile to his agenda.
Brito signed the IRS complaint and filed it in the Southern District of Florida federal court in January. He’s one of four lawyers Williams sanctioned — including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s nominee to replace Pam Bondi — for trying to “manipulate the judicial process.”
The case could have been called Trump v. Trump. He was the main plaintiff, acting not as president but as an individual claiming the illegal release of his tax returns caused enormous harm to him, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and his company.
The nominal defendants were the IRS and the Treasury Department, agencies within the executive, presidential branch of government. Agency heads connived with their boss, President Trump, to reach his goal, the judge found.
“Certainly, a court should not be a forum for a party that cynically views a lawsuit as a vehicle to achieve a predetermined outcome: ‘I’m suing myself,’” Williams wrote, quoting Trump.
In quick succession the lawsuit was filed and then dropped because the matter had been settled, Brito and the other lawyers said. But in her order, Williams forbade any reference to the discredited deal that made it look like a valid settlement.
The judge effectively canceled a plot to use a $1.776 billion slush fund to compensate the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol rioters Trump pardoned on the first day of his second term and now calls “peaceful protestors.” A second scheme added to the “settlement” would have protected Trump and his sons from tax fraud liability – forevermore.
“This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” Williams wrote.
“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel … make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President,” she wrote, “and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”
BRITO’S ACTIONS ‘REPREHENSIBLE’
The federal court rule that punishes lawyers like Brito for filing “bad faith” complaints is meant to deter future wrongdoing, Williams wrote.
“Brito’s conduct, to me, is reprehensible and unethical,” said Jeffrey Swartz, a former Miami-Dade County judge. He supported a motion by 35 former federal judges that urged Williams to reopen the IRS case after the lawyers argued it had been settled and should stay closed.
Williams invited the judges “whose briefing precipitated this order” to submit fee requests for which the plaintiffs — that is, Trump — will be held responsible. Fee reimbursement is a type of monetary sanction.
A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team responded to Williams’s ruling by saying the president “continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
Brito did not reply to an email from Florida Bulldog seeking comment.
The Florida Bar’s Jennifer Krell Davis acknowledged receipt of the Williams referral on July 14. The public probably will hear nothing more from the Bar about Brito’s role in Trump v. IRS.
That would be understandable, according to Robert Jarvis, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie.
“Matters involving Trump are, obviously, infused with politics, whereas the Bar really focuses on bread-and-butter type matters,” he said — lawyers who steal from trust accounts or overcharge their clients, for example.
“For better or worse, I think the Bar feels that matters involving Trump are best left to others,” Jarvis said. He was referring to “impeachment by Congress and voters exercising their powers at the ballot box.”
FLORIDA PROTECTS TRUMP LAWYERS
The Florida Supreme Court has not steered clear of politics in lawyer discipline – for example, the pending six-year-old case of The Florida Bar v. Daniel Will Uhlfelder is widely regarded as payback for Uhlfelder’s opposition to Gov. Ron DeSantis. And ethically challenged lawyers in Trump’s orbit tend to emerge unscathed from the Bar disciplinary process.
The court has adopted rules prohibiting Bar investigations of public officials. The rules protected Pam Bondi when she was attorney general and a coalition of 70 legal scholars, retired Florida Supreme Court justices and former judges from across the nation called for her Bar investigation.
Nothing happened. Nor has an expanded Bondi complaint, filed after she left office in May, resulted in charges.
The rules didn’t protect former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, Trump’s abortive first choice for attorney general in his second term. Gaetz was briefly the subject of a Bar grievance committee review in May 2025, after he left office, but it ended with no public accounting and no consequences for him.
The Bar responded to public demand for an investigation after a U.S. House Ethics Committee revealed the Republican congressman took drugs and paid young women for sex in a pattern that persisted for more than three years. The House committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz committed statutory rape under Florida law by having sex with a 17-year-old girl in 2017, when he was 35.
Yet the Bar grievance committee decided to close the Gaetz case without investigating him because of an ethics rule comment that distinguishes “offenses of personal morality” from offenses “relevant to law practice,” says an Aug. 15, 2025 letter from the committee to Gaetz that Florida Bulldog found in his Bar file.
In other words, committee members thought an allegation of statutory rape wasn’t enough to justify a Gaetz investigation because rape has nothing to do with practicing law.
Committee chair Casey Pless Waterhouse did urge Gaetz to “Never forget that ‘a lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer’ and you do not take that hat off regardless of what other roles you may fulfill,” the letter says.
IS TICKTIN A MODEL FOR BRITO?
The Trump associate whose federal court experience most closely resembles Brito’s is Peter Ticktin, a Deerfield Beach lawyer who represented his old pal from military high school in Trump v. Clinton.
The case was Trump’s attempt to relitigate and profit from conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic establishment and others he claimed tried to steal the 2016 presidential election – his first political victory.
In 2022 West Palm Beach U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks dismissed the case in a blistering opinion much like Judge Williams’s July 13 order, which cites Trump v. Clinton repeatedly.
“The rule of law is undermined by … efforts to advance a political narrative through lawsuits without factual basis or any cognizable legal theory,” Middlebrooks wrote. He referred Ticktin and another Trump lawyer to their respective state Bars for discipline.
But when the judge’s Ticktin referral reached the Florida Bar, it disappeared. The Bar never acknowledged its inaction, but 14 months later, Ticktin confirmed to Florida Bulldog that the Bar hadn’t reached out to him – “nor should it.”
Yet the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld Middlebrooks’s decision, including $1 million in sanctions against Trump and his lawyers.
Jeffrey Swartz argues the case against Brito that Williams laid out in her ruling is solid legally and has nothing to do with politics. If the Florida Bar follows through and assigns a grievance committee to investigate Brito, Swartz is confident the committee will find probable cause that he violated ethics rules and deserves punishment.
The Florida Bar Board of Governors’ Executive Committee must approve probable cause findings. “If they overrule a Bar committee and let Brito off the hook, they’re doing it for political reasons, not ethical reasons,” said Swartz, an emeritus professor at Cooley Law School in Tampa.
“Then I don’t want to hear them talk about professionalism and ethics,” he said angrily.
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