Shortly after taking office, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys that they must “zealously” advocate for the interests of the United States and the president. A coalition of left-wing groups and law professors responded by urging the Florida bar to investigate her for misconduct.
The complaint filed against Bondi in June is one of at least a dozen ethics complaints left-wing groups have thrown at lawyers in high positions, including Deputy United States Attorney General Todd Blanche, as well as DOJ attorneys simply defending the administration in litigation.
“Part of the problem is that many government lawyers are licensed in liberal jurisdictions, with liberal bars, managed by liberal supreme courts — D.C., California, and New York, most notably,” Mike Fragoso, who was chief counsel to former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Jeff Clark, a White House official who served in the DOJ during Trump’s first administration, faces the ongoing threat of losing his law license after the D.C. Bar found he attempted to give “dishonest” legal advice related to the 2020 election.
Standards for evaluating complaints vary by jurisdiction, Fragoso said.
The bar complaint critiques Bondi’s leadership by citing several internal incidents — such as the firing of a lawyer on the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case and dismissing the prosecution of New York Mayor Eric Adams — to allege she has “launched a concerted effort to override ethical obligations.” The coalition of left-wing groups and law professors filed it despite the state bar declining two prior complaints others filed against Bondi because it “does not investigate or prosecute sitting officers appointed under the U.S. Constitution while they are in office.”
“This policy means that the Bar will exercise no authority over the behavior of lawyers licensed in Florida who happen to be appointed as an officer of the United States,” their complaint states.
A few groups are responsible for the bulk of recent complaints, with The Legal Accountability Center (LAC) leading the charge. LAC hit three DOJ attorneys in August with a complaint alleging they made “misleading” statements in court about the administration’s effort to close the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
The same organization filed a complaint against Pardon Attorney Ed Martin in February. Martin told the DCNF in May that he wanted to spend time looking into bar associations for targeting conservative attorneys, noting he hopes to expose the “weaponization of the bar associations against lawyers.”
Michael Teter, who leads LAC, also led the 65 Project, a group that filed complaints against President Donald Trump’s attorneys after the 2020 election, including Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman.
A California court upheld in July a recommendation for Eastman to lose his law license. While he has faced complaints in both D.C. and California, Teter’s group pushed for him to be removed from the Supreme Court Bar in 2022.
The 65 Project also filed complaints against Republican State Attorneys General like Lynn Fitch of Mississippi and Steve Marshall of Alabama.
Only three of nearly 80 complaints filed by the 65 Project between 2022 and 2023 resulted in publicly disclosed disciplinary actions, according to an analysis by The Center Square. Teter told CNN in 2022 that his organization’s complaints are “creating a system of deterrence.”
America First Legal (AFL) hit Teter with a bar complaint in October for allegedly abusing the process “to punish lawyers associated” with Trump.
“Seeking the personal destruction and financial ruin of another lawyer–simply because of the client he represented or the cause he took up–runs counter to not only the letter and spirit of the law governing the activities of lawyers, but is completely contrary to the way we conduct ourselves in a free society,” AFL Executive Director Gene Hamilton said in a statement.
NYC Bar on Comey’s indictment: “Such politically motivated prosecutions strike at the very core of our democratic system.”
NYC Bar on Trump’s indictment: “Nothing suggests that Mr. Trump will not receive a fair trial, nor that any violations of his legal rights have thus far… pic.twitter.com/aqNUtfeclk
Should bar associations investigate attorneys for their political actions during their terms?— Katelynn Richardson (@katesrichardson) September 30, 2025
Yet Teter’s organization, which did not respond to a request for comment, isn’t alone.
Campaign for Accountability (CfA), which was founded by former leaders of the left-wing Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), is behind other complaints. CfA has received funding from the New Venture Fund and the Hopewell Fund, left-wing organizations that are part of Arabella Advisors’ nonprofit network.
In June, CfA filed a complaint against Alina Habba for “her ordering the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, subsequent prosecution of Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, and announcing a criminal investigation into New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and Attorney General Matt Platkin.”
It filed a complaint in February against Emil Bove, who served as the DOJ’s third-in-command at the beginning of Trump’s term and is now a Third Circuit judge, suggesting he violated ethics rules in directing the dismissal of the Adams indictment. The Attorney Grievance Committee in New York declined in May to investigate CFA’s request.
Democratic California Sen. Adam Schiff in March called on the New York State Bar to investigate Emil Bove. The New York Senate Judiciary Committee also filed a complaint against Bove.
Most recently, CfA filed a complaint against Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brennan Carr, alleging he may have violated the Rules of Professional Conduct by suggesting ABC should suspend Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
“Every day, the Justice Department’s attorneys are going into court and vigorously defending the Executive Branch with integrity,” a DOJ spokesperson told the DCNF. “Any assertion that our attorneys have engaged in professional misconduct is baseless and unfounded.”
CfA did not respond to a request for comment.
“No one should be able to just read the newspaper and file such a complaint,” Clark wrote on X in response to the complaint against Carr.
“President Trump is your client in his official capacity as the head of the Executive Branch,” Clark continued. “What the ‘Campaign for Accountability’ thinks is irrelevant. They are just outside observers.”
Clark, whose entire fight to keep his law license hinges on a draft letter he wrote suggesting there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, recently received support in his appeal from three former attorney generals.
“Disciplining federal attorneys for internal debates over policy and law enforcement functions would interfere with the Executive Branch’s core constitutional ability to carry out its duties far more concretely than mere disclosure,” former U.S. Attorneys General William Barr, Jeff Sessions and Michael Mukasey wrote in a brief supporting Clark.
“Disciplining Mr. Clark would open the door to charging federal lawyers with ‘dishonesty’ or ‘attempted dishonesty’ for statements made during oral arguments, theories in briefs, legal advice provided in memoranda, or even (as here) proposals in privileged internal draft documents and discussions,” they wrote. “Such acts of political retribution would severely discourage lawyers from serving in the federal government and invite extraordinary dysfunction as federal lawyers constrain the advice they provide for fear of political retaliation by the Bar.”
Congress, the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court are limited in what they can do, given that the practice of law is a state matter, Fragoso said.
“Twenty years ago I think the ethics boards would have done the right thing and made it very clear they don’t want their time wasted with these complaints, but the John Eastman and Jeff Clark examples make it clear that is unlikely,” he said.
“The solution might be for conservative lawyers to get admitted in a state like Texas or Florida, and for their supreme courts to make it clear that lawfare bar discipline from liberal jurisdictions won’t bear on fitness to practice,” Fragoso continued. “It would be sort of like how companies are leaving Delaware for Texas now that the Delaware courts are getting politicized. But that would probably require red states to liberalize their admission requirements, which are often quite strict.”
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