Pam Bondi slapped with ethics complaint by ex-Florida Supreme Court justices
President Donald Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, has been hit with an ethical misconduct complaint filed at the Florida State Bar, Florida Politics reported on Thursday.
The complaint, reported Jesse Scheckner, "comes from some 70 law professionals, including former Florida Supreme Court Justices Barbara Pariente, James Perry and Peggy Quince."
It accuses Bondi of a systematic pattern of demanding lawyers employed by the Justice Department commit ethics violations on behalf of "zealous advocacy" for the Trump administration's policy goals, and either terminating or forcing the resignation of those who refuse to do so.
Among the incidents listed in the complaint are the resignation of Denise Cheung, a criminal division investigator who refused to investigate whether a Biden administration-era contract was unlawfully awarded due to a lack of evidence; Erez Reuvani, a lawyer who was terminated for advising the DOJ to facilitate the return of Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was deported despite a court order prohibiting it; and the flood of prosecutors in the Southern District of New York who resigned rather than follow Bondi's orders to drop federal bribery charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Bondi has faced multiple other bar complaints since being appointed to head up the Justice Department, including one filed by California Reps. Dave Min and Mike Levin.
DOJ chief of staff Chad Mizelle issued an adversarial response to the news, saying, “This third vexatious attempt [to complain to the state bar] will fail to do anything other than prove that the signatories have less intelligence — and independent thought — than sheep.”
Before being appointed to DOJ, Bondi served as an impeachment defense lawyer for Trump, and before that was attorney general of Florida, where she also faced ethics questions over her decision to drop a state investigation into Trump's fake university scam at the same time Trump's now-defunct charitable foundation made a donation to a political group supporting her.