Former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has been hit with a damning new ethics complaint demanding she be investigated and possibly disbarred.
The complaint was lodged on Wednesday with the Florida Bar by Peggy Quince, 78, a retired chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and is backed by more than 120 judges, law professors, and attorneys.
It is their second attempt after the Florida Bar rejected an earlier bid last June, while Bondi, 60, was still in office, on the grounds that it does not investigate sitting federal appointees. President Donald Trump, 79, fired her in April, removing that hurdle.
The coalition—backed by Lawyers Defending American Democracy, the Democracy Defenders Fund, and Lawyers for the Rule of Law—says Bondi strong-armed DOJ lawyers into compromising their ethics or losing their jobs. “No one lawyer is above the law,” Quince said in a statement.
Much of the complaint zeroes in on Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. It accuses Bondi of misleading the public about a supposed “client list” she once claimed was on her desk, then bungling the document release so badly that unredacted names, birth dates, and even nude photos of the disgraced financier’s victims spilled out.
Lawyers for the survivors branded one January dump “the single most egregious violation of victim privacy in one day in United States history,” with Virginia Canter, chief counsel at the Democracy Defenders Fund, saying, “Lawyers have been disbarred for less.”
The complaint also charges that Bondi waved through prosecutions lacking probable cause against Trump’s foes—among them former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose cases a federal judge threw out in November—and against protesters swept up at immigration raids. Comey was re-indicted in late April on a different charge, under her replacement, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was formerly Trump’s personal attorney.
Under Bondi’s watch, DOJ lawyers flouted court orders in dozens of cases, it says, with the Democracy Defenders Fund saying she had “created an environment in which DOJ lawyers were induced to engage in acts they were ethically prohibited from doing, under threat of suspension or termination—or were fired for not doing so.”
The Justice Department has come out swinging against the complaint, branding it “a baseless and pathetic media stunt conjured up by inept attorneys desperate for relevance,” in a statement to the Daily Beast.
Bondi is due before the House Oversight Committee on Friday over its Epstein probe—but only in a closed-door, transcribed interview, not the public, sworn deposition Democrats wanted. “Bondi must testify under oath, on camera, for the public to see,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury, 47, wrote on X.
In the weeks since her firing, Bondi has been recovering from thyroid cancer surgery while Trump has handed her a seat on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The Daily Beast has contacted Bondi, the Justice Department, and the White House for comment.
