Justice Department lawyers—including political appointees and career staff—are facing bar complaints over their work defending the Trump administration, but complainants alleging ethical violations shouldn’t expect swift resolution.
The Legal Accountability Center, helmed by attorney and legal advocate Michael Teter, released a bar complaint Wednesday against Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alleging conflicts of interest in his review of Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony on matters related to Jeffrey Epstein, and against DOJ Special Attorney Ed Martin accusing him of multiple professional conduct violations.
Teter’s group has also accused three DOJ lawyers of making “materially misleading” statements to assure a federal judge that the Trump administration didn’t plan to shutter the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, contradicting internal emails that amounted to stop-work orders.
The DOJ lawyers’ alleged misconduct in that case included burying key facts in written staff declarations, inducing other colleagues to commit conduct violations, and filing briefs that misrepresented the steps taken by top CFPB officials as measures to streamline or tighten staff supervision, according to the LAC complaint.
Blanche was accused of ethics violations related to the Maxwell interview, which he conducted in his capacity as deputy attorney general after serving as lead counsel for President Donald Trump in multiple investigations and criminal prosecutions before reelection.
The LAC also said that Blanche misused his supervisory authority over DOJ attorneys by allowing or failing to mitigate conduct, including the alleged violations in the CFPB case.
A DOJ spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Setting Standards
Scrutinizing individual DOJ lawyers’ conduct is unlikely to result in any quick rulings for plaintiffs challenging the Trump administration, given the typically slow pace that bar complaints take in proceedings at the state level.
“The disciplinary process is at times an imperfect tool for addressing actions by lawyers that run afoul of our ethical obligations,” said Renee Knake Jefferson, a professor of legal ethics at the University of Houston Law Center.
But the message that lawyers send to the public and their professional community by calling out perceived misconduct at the DOJ sets a critical standard, law professors and advocates said.
“It’s not purely symbolic,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law. “It’s part of an important campaign to ensure accountability at the most important government legal office in the country and to shine a spotlight on actions that may indeed cross ethical lines, to create mechanisms of accountability that could actually have some teeth in the sense that specific lawyers might be sanctioned and have to be pulled off cases.”
Despite the sluggish pace, Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, and other Trump-linked lawyers ultimately faced professional consequences—including disbarment and suspension—for their efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, following complaints by Teter and other legal advocates.
‘Very Seldom Used’
Former DOJ career attorneys and supervisors—Anthony Coppolino, James Gilligan, John Griffiths, Jennifer Ricketts, Carlotta Wells—said they were “dismayed” in particular by the Legal Accountability Center’s complaints against two career Civil Division lawyers, special counsel Brad Rosenberg and trial attorney Liam Holland, defending the CFPB.
“We certainly agree that DOJ attorneys must conduct themselves with utmost integrity,” they said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg Law after the CFPB-related complaints were filed. “But targeting career attorneys in this case is misplaced and unfounded.”
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric Hamilton was also hit with a bar complaint from Teter’s group for alleged misrepresentations he made while defending the administration against the National Treasury Employees Union’s challenge, which the ex-DOJ lawyers also took exception to.
“Although the NTEU court found that written testimony first submitted by the government in response to the emergency motion was misleading, our former colleagues took immediate steps to correct the record in response to plaintiffs’ evidence,” the ex-DOJ staff members said. “Under these circumstances, leaving any such inquiry in the first instance to the court and the parties, who have intimate knowledge of the facts and circumstances that state bar authorities lack, would be a far better approach for determining whether sanctionable misconduct occurred.”
State bar associations could take longer to discern whether the purported misrepresentations warrant disciplinary action, even extending beyond the life cycle of the case in which the alleged misconduct occurred.
“There are some jurisdictions that do have these kinds of expedited regulatory powers to suspend licenses in the case of imminent harm to public interest,” Cummings said. “There is a mechanism, but it’s very seldom used and it hasn’t been used in this particular context.”
Accountability Matters
Attorney accountability is central to the mission of the legal professional organizations behind high-profile bar complaints, according to Lauren Stiller Rikleen, executive director of Lawyers Defending American Democracy.
Rikleen’s group has alleged ethics violations by Attorney General Pam Bondi, ex-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, as well as Giuliani and other ex-Trump lawyers.
Giuliani ultimately lost his license to practice law in Washington and New York, and a California state bar review panel ruled that Eastman should lose his over their work boosting claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The impact of bar complaints against other high-profile lawyers tied to the administration may be less apparent, Jefferson said.
“Sometimes the proceedings can be pretty opaque,” she said. “The discipline process is also limited to sanctions that range from a public or private reprimand up to the permanent loss of a law license, but that’s all that can come out of a disciplinary proceeding, which sometimes isn’t very satisfying.”
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