Retired Chief Justice Leads Push To Strip Pam Bondi of Her Law License

The campaign to revoke Pam Bondi’s law license is back, and this time the procedural armor that protected her has vanished.A 23-page ethics complaint filed with the Florida Bar on May 27 by a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, Peggy Quince, accuses the former attorney general of fostering an “environment of lawlessness” inside the Justice Department. The filing is joined by the Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, Lawyers for the Rule of Law, and more than 100 scholars and retired judges.President Trump removed Ms. Bondi on April 2, closing out what proved to be the shortest confirmed attorney generalship in six decades. Her exit also closed the procedural door that the Florida Bar had been hiding behind. In June 2025, when the same coalition filed its first complaint, the barshut it down on the grounds it had no jurisdiction over a sitting constitutional officer. That reasoning no longer holds.“Now that Ms. Bondi is no longer Attorney General, it is imperative that The Florida Bar open an investigation of her apparent misconduct in that office,” the complaint states. This time, the petitioners argue, the Bar has no off-ramp.“The Bar is required by its rules to conduct an investigation of every ethics complaint that is filed against a lawyer who is admitted to practice in Florida,” the co-chair of Lawyers Defending American Democracy and a former managing partner of Ropes & Gray, John Montgomery, tells The New York Sun.So, will it?A shield that no longer holdsIt has not been for lack of opportunities. A Miami attorney, Jon May, went to the Florida Supreme Court after the Bar waved off the first complaint, asking the justices to compel an investigation. Five of them knocked it back in a single paragraph; Mr. May had not shown a clear legal right to what he was asking for, they said, and that was that. The whole thing took about a year to go precisely nowhere.The picture grew more complicated, and more telling, in the months that followed.The Bar initially signaled in February that it had opened a probe into Lindsey Halligan, the Trump loyalist whose unlawful stint as interim federal prosecutor in Virginia, never confirmed by the Senate, produced the since-dismissed prosecutions of the former FBI director, James Comey, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James.The Bar walked that back within 24 hours, saying its counsel had written “erroneously,” before ultimately confirming a formal probe in April. The episode, equal parts farce and precedent, established that the Bar would scrutinize former federal lawyers for conduct in office, a template that now looms over Ms. Bondi.The Justice Department moved in May to shut down the whole question, suing the District of Columbia’s bar disciplinary authorities on a separate case in which it argued that the Supremacy Clause bars state bodies from sanctioning federal lawyers for what they do on the job. The named target in that case was Jeffrey Clark, a former assistant attorney general facing disbarment over his push to get the Justice Department to cast doubt on the 2020 election results — yet the legal principle would apply equally to Ms. Bondi.It is a fight that, if the Justice Department prevails, could effectively prevent the Florida Bar from reaching Ms. Bondi as well.“The Bar may choose to view the issue as between DOJ and Bondi only. That would be wrong, but the Bar may resist tangling with DOJ,” a professor of law at New York University, Stephen Gillers, tells the Sun. He notes that the department has claimed first-instance authority to review complaints against its current or former lawyers for conduct while in office.The Justice Department has come out swinging against the May 27 filing against Ms. Bondi, branding it “a baseless and pathetic media stunt conjured up by inept attorneys desperate for relevance.”“I expect the Florida Bar to open a formal investigation, but I doubt it will be pursued with real vigor,” a political strategist and managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas, tells the Sun. “Complaints against high-profile Republicans often get more procedural attention than substance.”‘Difficult to prove’The Epstein documents sit at the heart of the complaint. In a Fox News interview in February 2025, Ms. Bondi told viewers that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” a claim the Justice Department later quietly buried, concluding no such incriminating list existed.The complaint accuses Ms. Bondi of misleading the public on that claim, and of overseeing a document release so badly botched that unredacted names, birth dates, and photographs of victims were exposed. Attorneys for survivors urged a federal judge to intervene, writing that the release “may be the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.”It further alleges that Ms. Bondi breached her obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and “permitted and incentivized” violations of court orders in dozens of cases.The filing also revives the foundational grievance: a “zealous advocacy” memorandum issued on Ms. Bondi’s first day in office, which signatories say threatened Justice Department lawyers with discipline or termination if they placed their ethical obligations above the administration’s directives.Yet even sympathetic scholars see a rough road for the complaint.“The allegations are serious, but many of them are difficult to prove,” a professor of law at New York Law School and legal ethics historian, Rebecca Roiphe, tells the Sun. “When Bill Clinton’s license was suspended, for instance, a court had already found that he lied under oath. I think the difficulty in the allegations against Bondi is that there are important and complex factual questions that would be hard for the Florida court to resolve in connection with a disciplinary matter.”President Clinton surrendered his Arkansas law license on his last day in office in January 2001, a five-year suspension agreed to in exchange for prosecutors not pursuing criminal charges, after a federal judge had found he had given deliberately false testimony about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky during the Paula Jones civil case.New York and California made such determinations against Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, Ms. Roiphe points out, “but they were subject to severe criticism and accusation of weaponization.”Others see nothing but politics.“There is no upside for the Florida Bar to open an investigation into what are, at the end of the day, purely political matters,” a professor of law at Nova Southeastern University, Robert Jarvis, tells the Sun. “This is a politically motivated complaint that has nothing to do with the ethics rules.”Mr. Jarvis also argues that “no clients were harmed by Bondi’s actions, which is the reason lawyers get into trouble,” and predicts any runaway case would die on appeal.“The Florida Supreme Court is a hard-right court, is closely aligned with Trump, and will not act against Bondi,” he continues. “Indeed, if this investigation gains any legs, I would not be surprised if Trump preemptively pardoned Bondi.”Mr. Gillers, too, “strongly” doubts disbarment is on the table, and Mr. Thomas calls it “highly unlikely,” with dismissal or a private reprimand the most probable outcomes. Mr. Montgomery, however, counters that “disbarment is always an option available to the Bar in serious cases that warrant that outcome.”The stakes beyond one licenseThe complaint is not the only accountability front. Ms. Bondi sat for a closed-door, transcribed interview with the House Oversight Committee over the Epstein investigation, not the public sworn deposition Democrats sought.The 111-page transcript released June 4 showed her declining to answer a string of questions and pointing to the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, as the official who “was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning.”Since her firing — driven by Mr. Trump’s frustration with her botched handling of the Epstein files and the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute his political adversaries successfully — Mr. Trump has appointed Ms. Bondi to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where she will coordinate between government officials and tech executives on artificial intelligence policy, while recovering from a thyroid cancer diagnosis.For the signatories, the deeper question is whether the legal profession can police its most powerful members at all. The complaint “catalogs disturbing unethical conduct unbecoming of any lawyer, no less the Attorney General,” a law professor at Hofstra University, Ellen Yaroshefsky, tells the Sun. “If the Bar tried to dodge this complaint, it just further undermines respect for the rule of law and lawyer self-regulation.”Mr. Thomas argues the opposite, that restraint would be the healthier signal.“If the Florida Bar declines to pursue serious discipline, it would actually be a positive signal that the organization is not being used as a political weapon,” he says. “Pursuing weak or ideologically driven complaints against former Trump administration officials would only deepen that perception and further erode public trust in bar associations.”Mr. Gillers, however, warns that inaction carries its own price.“That would be an abdication of the Florida Supreme Court’s obligation to police the behavior of the lawyers it licenses, even when acting for the federal government, and in effect give federal lawyers the equivalent of immunity if they violate the court’s own rules,” he says.For Mr. Montgomery, the answer will reverberate far beyond one law license.“Lawyers play a critical role in our democracy as ‘officers of the court’ who are bound by a code of ethics that governs their conduct,” he says. “If the Attorney General can ignore those ethical constraints, then we will have suffered a serious blow to our ability to achieve justice ‘without fear or favor’ and, in turn, to democracy.”

Retired Chief Justice Leads Push To Strip Pam Bondi of Her Law License

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