If Attorney General Pam Bondi has her way, an extremely important guardrail could disappear.
The DOJ’s ethics proposal would have a corrupt fox guarding the henhouse
If Attorney General Pam Bondi has her way, an extremely important guardrail could disappear.
www.ms.now/opinion/doj-...
— (@creolenl.bsky.social) 2026-03-18T12:21:25.382Z
https://www.ms.now/opinion/doj-ethics-proposal-pam-bondi
State bar associations play an important accountability role across the country. Trump administration lawyers know that their legal licenses are subject to censure, because practicing law in the United States remains a privilege, not a right. But if Attorney General Pam Bondi has her way, even this guardrail could disappear.
Last week, Bondi proposed a new rule that would allow the Department of Justice to take over investigations of alleged attorney misconduct of its own lawyers. State bar authorities would have to pause their investigations while the Justice Department conducts its own probe. The rule gives the DOJ the ability to delay or even derail a state investigation.
It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that there has been a series of state ethics complaints filed against Trump administration lawyers, including Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and federal prosecutors handling immigration cases. President Donald Trump’s polarizing pardon attorney Ed Martin is currently facing just such a complaint from the D.C. Bar.,,,,
Federal law requires all federal prosecutors to comply with the ethics rules of the state where they practice law, including the District of Columbia. The new rule requires Justice Department lawyers to obey the substance of their state’s ethics rules, but gives the DOJ the authority to investigate violations. According to the proposal, whenever a bar grievance is filed, “the Department will have the right to review the allegations in the first instance and shall request that the bar disciplinary authority suspend any parallel investigations until the completion of the Department’s review.”.....
In the decades since the Watergate scandal, the Justice Department has conducted robust investigations of allegations of ethical misconduct by its own attorneys and imposed discipline. In fact, it was common for state bar authorities to wait for the DOJ to complete its investigations before initiating their own probes, because the federal process held attorneys to standards even higher than state ethics rules. But that landscape changed last year, when Bondi fired the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility and its chief ethics officer. Now there is a risk that DOJ lawyers will be even further sheltered from meaningful ethical oversight.
Bondi has fired the officials at the Office of Professional Responsibility to give the MAGA assholes free reign in violating their ethical responsibilities. These proposed regulations will be challenged if adopted
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