Former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi
A coalition that includes Florida attorneys and former Florida judges appears poised to restart its campaign to urge the Florida Bar to investigate Pam Bondi for ethics violations now that she is no longer the U.S. attorney general.
President Trump fired Bondi on April 2, and she said in a Facebook post that she would help her replacement, Todd Blanche, in his transition to become leader of the Justice Department over the next month. Bondi then plans to move on to a private sector job.
The legal coalition that included Lawyers Defending American Democracy as well as Florida attorney Jon May and retired Florida Chief Justice Barbara Pariente filed a complaint against Bondi last year, accusing her of compelling Justice Department attorneys to violate their ethical obligations under the law in the furtherance of Trump’s political objectives over the interests of the United States as a whole.
The complaint also brought up the cases of three department lawyers who were allegedly fired or compelled to resign as a result of demands by Bondi or her senior management team to act unethically.
The Florida Bar – whose members include Bondi – declined to comment about the prospect of it launching a probe of Bondi’s professional conduct, now that she is no longer a federal official. In response to the complaint about her last year, the Florida Bar indicated it was bound by a rule that does not allow it to investigate or prosecute sitting constitutional officeholders.
A spokesman for Lawyers Defending American Democracy said the group had not made a final decision about launching a new effort to get the bar to investigate Bondi’s conduct.
“Our coalition is evaluating all of its options and whatever we do will be based on careful analysis of the facts and the code of professional conduct,” John Montgomery told the Florida Record in an email.
Last fall, the legal coalition and attorney May urged the Florida Supreme Court to order the Florida Bar to probe Bondi’s conduct, but the high court declined. May did not respond to requests to comment about a potential new investigation, but he told a journalism outlet, the Discrepancy Report, that the coalition is working on an expanded ethics complaint that will include Bondi’s more recent conduct.
In her social media post, Bondi said that since February 2025 the department had amassed a series of successes, including efforts to reduce the murder rate to its lowest level in 125 years, obtaining terrorism convictions against Antifa members and taking into custody “more than 90 key cartel figures.”
“Zealous advocacy … never justifies placing a client’s interest above the lawyer’s obligation to obey (ethics) rules and is never an acceptable defense to a charge of violating those rules,” May said last year when the initial ethics complaint was filed with the Florida Bar. “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."
Another group that is part of the legal coalition, the Washington-based Democracy Defenders Fund, this week called on Blanche to withdraw a proposed Justice Department rule that would give the federal agency greater power to block or delay state ethics investigations of the department’s attorneys.
Bondi argued the rule was needed to deal with the “weaponization” of state ethics complaints against department lawyers.
Caption: Pam Bondi may face a renewed ethics complaint that could trigger an investigation by the Florida Bar.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Department of Justice
