The Florida Bar has thrown out another misconduct complaint against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, a bar member in the state and Florida’s first female attorney general, according to the Miami Herald.
The newspaper reported Bondi was accused of “serious professional misconduct” Thursday by a group of Florida liberal-leaning and moderate law professors, attorneys and Florida Supreme Court justices.
The coalition alleged Bondi violated her ethical duties as U.S. attorney general and that she has engaged in “serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice,” the Herald reported.
The ethics complaint said she “has sought to compel Department of Justice lawyers to violate their ethical obligations under the guise of ‘zealous advocacy,’” which is detailed in a memo she sent to DOJ workers on Feb. 5, 2025, on her first day on the job.
The complainants also accused Bondi of intimidating staffers through threats of discipline or termination if they refused to “to zealously pursue the President’s political objectives.” And contended these actions are a violation of the Florida Bar and longstanding norms at the Justice Department, the Herald reported.
Bondi is a member of the Florida Bar in Good Standing.” However, opponents accuse her of weaponizing the Department of Justice for political payback. They say she’s behind numerous resignations and firings at the agency since she took office.
Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, in a statement to the Herald Thursday, lambasted what he called an ongoing campaign against the attorney general by “out-of-state lawyers to weaponize the bar complaint process.”
“This third vexatious attempt will fail to do anything other than prove that the signatories have less intelligence — and independent thought — than sheep,” Mizelle said.
In the previous efforts to disbar Bondi, two California congressmen wrote a letter to the Florida bar in May, accusing Bondi of “potentially serious violations” of the law and her “ethical obligations as an attorney,” the news outlet Florida Politics wrote.
They cited her “legally questionable positions and tactics in a case involving the deportation of Venezuelan nationals,” and statements that seem “designed to undermine the judiciary and potentially endanger judges.”
Florida Politics also reported FactPAC, a political action committee that supports Democratic candidates, demanded her disbarment in a campaign last month “due to potential violations of legal ethics and professional responsibilities.”
The watchdog group pointed to Bondi’s failure to report lobbying work she engaged in for foreign entities while part of Trump’s legal team and her work to overturn the results of the 2020 election, among other complaints against her.
The Herald reported that in rejecting the latest ethics complaint against Bondi, the Florida Bar issued a reason similar to why it threw out the other complaints, saying it “does not investigate or prosecute sitting officers” who are appointed under the U.S. Constitution.
“Since her first day on the job, Pam Bondi has made clear that she plans to use the Department of Justice for political pursuits, and she has done just that,” the executive director of the legal nonprofit advocacy group Democracy Defenders Fund, Norm Eisen, told the newspaper.
During her Senate confirmation hearing, Bondi remained uncommitted on whether the DOJ would remain politically independent, a longstanding norm at the agency before Trump’s second term, and whether she would stand up to the president. She said at the time only that “politics has to be taken out of this system.” That clearly hasn’t happened.
The Senate confirmed Bondi as U.S. attorney general in a split vote in February.
