The Department of Justice is a lawless hellscape right now, having descended into nothing but President Donald Trump’s personal law firm and revenge machine.
It’s stuffed with baby lawyers with no experience, Trump’s own former criminal defense attorneys, and a rotating cast of line attorneys who face threats of civil and criminal contempt from judges who are sick of the DOJ’s bullshit.
Attorney General Pam Bondi
But rather than trying to fix anything, Attorney General Pam Bondi has a different solution: ban state bars from investigating or disciplining current and former DOJ attorneys.
Sure, the licensing and regulation of lawyers is entirely left to individual states, and the federal government has no role, but that’s no obstacle for Bondi.
Her proposed rule would require state bars to give the DOJ the right to review complaints and allegations whenever it opens an investigation into a current or former DOJ attorney. Then, Bondi gets to “request” that the state bar just stop investigating until her review is done.
Is there any limitation on how long Bondi gets to pretend she’s investigating? Nope!
Also, it’s not really a “request,” because if a state bar says no and proceeds with an investigation, “the Department shall take appropriate action to prevent the bar disciplinary authorities from interfering with the Attorney General’s review of the allegations.”
Of course, this new policy would protect Bondi, who has been the subject of a detailed complaint to the Florida Bar, which got kicked because the bar said it wouldn’t investigate appointed officers while they’re in office. But eventually—fingers crossed—Bondi will not be in office.
But it isn’t just Bondi who would benefit from this sort of protection. Several high-level DOJ attorneys have been the subject of complaints, but state bars have been refusing to investigate them while they’re still in office.
So Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hasn’t yet seen any fallout from a complaint in New York, nor has anything happened to “Eagle” Ed Martin regarding the complaint against him in Washington, D.C., nor the dearly departed Lindsey Halligan’s complaint in Virginia.
Lindsey Halligan, the pretend U.S. attorney who would benefit greatly from Bondi’s proposed ban on state bar investigations.
Protection of “former attorneys” would help Halligan a lot, as she’s no longer at the DOJ. During her brief time there, she did rack up a raft of ethical violations and got called out by the court for misstating the law and continuing to sign things as U.S. attorney long after the court told her she very much was not a U.S. attorney.
Though the Virginia Bar refused to investigate Halligan while she was still at the DOJ, the watchdog that filed the complaint has now asked the bar to review it again. The bar may still decide not to investigate, but it won’t be able to hang it on the same feeble excuse.
To be fair, Bondi didn’t invent this idea out of whole cloth. The DOJ tried this during the Reagan years, issuing an Office of Legal Counsel opinion in 1985 that basically said that the Supremacy Clause prevents state bars from disciplining government attorneys.
Congress, however, decided that this was nonsense and passed a statute in 1998 explicitly stating that government attorneys “shall be subject to State laws and rules, and local Federal court rules, governing attorneys in each State where such attorney engages in that attorney’s duties, to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.”
That’s pretty crystal clear, but Bondi is taking her shot nonetheless because DOJ attorneys are behaving wildly unethically, and she wants to make sure they don’t suffer any consequences.
And, oh, those DOJ attorneys are definitely in trouble.
A cartoon by Jack Ohman.
A federal judge in Minnesota just demanded U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen to explain why he shouldn’t be held in criminal contempt for violating court orders to return belongings to people released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
And another federal judge in Minnesota held a DOJ lawyer in civil contempt, with a fine of $500 per day, until the government returned a detainee’s identification documents per the court’s order.
But even if Bondi somehow managed to make this happen, it wouldn’t stop judges from imposing civil or criminal contempt or other sanctions, since those don’t run through state bars as ethics complaints but are part of cases themselves.
It’s appalling that Bondi seeks to free the DOJ from any ethical oversight by the states, but there’s something else at work here that’s just as bad. This is as much an attack on state bars as it is on states themselves.
The Trump administration loathes federalism and has instead gone to war with blue states. Trying to strip state bar authorities of their ability to regulate their own attorneys based on their own rules is just another front in that war.
