Over 120 lawyers renew ethics complaint against ex-AG Pam Bondi with Florida Bar
Since President Donald Trump fired U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in April, a coalition of law professors, former judges and attorneys has urged the Florida Bar once again to open an investigation into allegations of professional misconduct against Bondi while the state-licensed lawyer headed the Department of Justice.
The liberal- and moderate-leaning group of more than 120 attorneys, led by former Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Peggy Quince, filed a complaint against Bondi with the state bar on Wednesday. They allege she violated several ethics rules while she zealously pursued Trump’s agenda targeting immigrants and his political enemies. The complaint also accuses her of misleading the public about the Justice Department’s files on convicted sex-offender Jeffrey Epstein and mishandling the release of those documents.
“As the former chief justice of this state’s highest court, there are key principles that we must protect,” Quince said in a statement provided to the Miami Herald. “First, whatever legal position you have achieved, you are still bound to follow the Rules of Professional Conduct. All lawyers are alike in that regard, and no one lawyer is above the law.”
Bondi is scheduled to testify on Friday in the House Oversight Committee’s Epstein probe.
Last June, the Florida Bar rejected the coalition’s initial request to open an investigation into Bondi, citing a jurisdictional issue that it “does not investigate or prosecute sitting officers appointed under the U.S. Constitution while they are in office.” But Bondi, a Florida native who previously served as a state prosecutor in Tampa and attorney general under Gov. Rick Scott, is no longer a Justice Department employee, which should compel the Florida Bar to open the investigation, the coalition said in its 25-page complaint.
“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 says. “Ms. Bondi’s misdeeds were not minor — they resulted in prejudice to the legal rights of those contending with the Department of Justice and injury to the public’s perception of the fairness of the legal system.”
The Florida Bar could not be immediately reached for comments.
The Justice Department lashed out at the group’s latest bid against Bondi, saying: “This complaint is nothing more than a baseless and pathetic media stunt conjured up by inept attorneys desperate for relevance.”
One month before Bondi’s firing, the Justice Department proposed a new regulation that would allow the agency to review a complaint of professional and ethics misconduct against a former employee before any state bar investigation.
On Wednesday, CNN and other media reported that Bondi, 60, is recovering from treatment for thyroid cancer following a diagnosis after she left the Justice Department in April. Trump recently appointed her to a White House advisory committee on artificial intelligence to serve as a liaison between the federal government and technology executives on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The coalition — including Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers for Rule of Law and Lawyers Defending American Democracy, of which Quince is a board member — has expanded significantly on its initial complaint. It had accused Bondi of “serious professional misconduct that threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice.” It also said she “sought to compel Department of Justice lawyers to violate their ethical obligations under the guise of ‘zealous advocacy,’ “ which she espoused in a Feb. 5, 2025, memo to all agency employees on her first day in office.
That complaint focused on the firing of a veteran immigration lawyer at the Justice Department and resignations of several top federal prosecutors who refused to carry out directives by Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer who now serves as his acting attorney general.
The coalition’s new complaint is rooted in Bondi’s “ ‘fall-in-line-or-be-gone’ philosophy that undermined the professional responsibility of [Justice] Department lawyers to exercise independent judgment and to offer honest advice.”
The complaint says Bondi caused the exodus of hundreds of federal prosecutors who were fired or resigned. They included some Miami-based prosecutors who were associated with the special counsel’s prosecution of Trump for his alleged withholding of classified documents and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters’ assault on the Capitol. The complaint also says the Justice Department under her watch violated federal court orders in dozens of immigration and related protest cases, and it pursued prosecutions of Trump’s political adversaries and others without sufficient probable cause that they committed crimes.
During her Senate confirmation hearing last year, Bondi vowed that she would not weaponize the Justice Department to target Trump’s adversaries. But the coalition’s complaint highlights that while she zealously carried out his retaliatory agenda, Trump grew impatient and pushed her to be more aggressive in targeting his political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. A federal judge dismissed their criminal cases in November, saying the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, who filed the charges, was unconstitutionally appointed by Bondi.
“Ms. Bondi took her practice of prosecuting without probable cause to a new level after September 20, 2025, when President Trump upbraided her, in a message that he posted on social media, for not moving quicker to pursue his enemies,” the complaint says. “Bondi promptly launched criminal prosecutions or investigations of the named individuals and others. These prosecutions all share a second characteristic: a lack of probable cause.”
A major portion of the coalition’s complaint zeroes in on Bondi’s handling of the so-called Epstein files, the Justice Department’s sex-trafficking investigation that has caused a political furor among Trump’s right-wing base. Epstein was convicted of soliciting minor girls in a state plea deal in West Palm Beach in 2008, but federal prosecutors filed a sex-trafficking indictment against him in 2019, which ended with his suicide in a lock-up that year.
Bondi’s troubles began last July when the Justice Department and FBI issued a memo shutting down the Epstein investigation, saying there was nothing more to report about the Manhattan-Palm Beach financier and his suicide or the existence of a client list — only to reopen it amid a bombardment of criticism by Trump’s MAGA base. Adding fuel to the fire: Bondi had told Fox News in February of last year that an Epstein client list of high-profile associates who might have had sex with minor girls was “sitting” on her Justice Department desk — but then changed her story after the memo was released.
Trump’s MAGA supporters grew more enraged. They repeated conspiracy theories on social media and in podcasts, suggesting without proof that Epstein didn’t kill himself and that major public figures might have sexually abused the underage girls whom Epstein recruited to his residences. They continued to fuel speculation about his client list and who might be on it.
In a rare bipartisan vote in November, Congress passed a law ordering the Justice Department to release the Epstein files — legislation that Trump reluctantly signed.
The coalition’s complaint alleges that the Bondi-led Justice Department’s handling and release of the documents have “been flawed from the beginning,” noting in particular that she misled the public about the existence of an Epstein client list and failed to protect his sex-abuse victims from any disclosure that would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Despite the privacy directive from Congress, the Justice Department on Dec. 19, 2025, released documents that contained the unredacted names and dates of birth of Epstein’s victims. One document identified more than 30 of them. However, instead of establishing stronger protective measures, the department released on Jan. 30, 2026, additional documents that included information about more than 100 survivors and had about 40 nude photos of women, some who might have been underage, the complaint says.
As the survivors’ lawyers explained in a court filing, the Justice Department’s release might have been “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history.”