The People Under Investigation Wrote the Investigation Rules

Corruption of Power GriftMatrix

Let me tell you what Todd Blanche actually said out loud, at a microphone, in front of an audience, at a Federalist Society conference in November: “We’re going to do everything we can to take these activist bars out of the picture.” That’s the Deputy Attorney General of the United States announcing, in advance, that he planned to gut the system that can pull his law license. And then four months later, they did it.

Yesterday, Pam Bondi signed a proposed rule – now sitting in the Federal Register – that says before any state bar can investigate a DOJ attorney for ethics violations, the Attorney General gets to review the complaint first and can ask the state to pause its investigation indefinitely. No timeline. No deadline. Just: wait until we’re done, and we’ll let you know when that is. If the state bar says no thanks, the rule says DOJ will take “appropriate action.” Appropriate action is not defined.

Here’s the part that should make your eye twitch: Bondi herself has an active ethics complaint against her, filed by over 70 lawyers and former judges, including two Florida Supreme Court justices, who say she pushed DOJ attorneys to violate their professional obligations while defending Trump’s agenda. The Florida Bar declined to investigate her – she’s a sitting constitutional officer, so they won’t touch her while she’s in office. But she wrote the rule anyway. She gave herself veto power over a complaint process that already wasn’t touching her, just in case anyone else got any ideas.

Blanche is in a similar situation. The Legal Accountability Center filed a complaint against him with the New York Attorney Grievance Committee for multiple alleged ethics violations. Blanche, who before this job was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney – yes, the same guy who sat at Trump’s defense table during the hush money trial – is now the number two at the Justice Department and apparently also in the business of regulating who gets to investigate him professionally.

The rule justifies itself by claiming bar complaints have been “weaponized” by political activists to harass brave DOJ lawyers for doing their jobs. This is the same DOJ that fired the head of its own internal ethics office earlier this year and then gutted the office. So: internal ethics oversight, gone. Now external ethics oversight, neutralized. The only thing left at this point is the honor system, and I think we’ve established where that’s at.

What state bars actually police is pretty basic stuff. Lying to courts. Hiding evidence. Conflicts of interest. That’s the existential threat Blanche declared war on. The fact that eliminating accountability for those things is the priority tells you something about what they’re planning to do that requires that kind of cover.

Former U.S. attorney Barb McQuade said the rule would give DOJ lawyers “carte blanche” – and yes, that’s genuinely her last name – to violate ethics rules. Former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance pointed out that the DOJ doesn’t actually have the legal authority to suspend state bar proceedings, which is the kind of detail you’d think would come up before publishing something in the Federal Register, but here we are.

The rule is proposed, not final. There’s a public comment period through April 6th. Legal experts expect it to get challenged immediately if finalized. But whether it survives court or not almost doesn’t matter. Bar investigations are already slow. Throw in an indefinite federal hold with no required timeline and you’ve buried most complaints long enough for everyone involved to run out the clock, which is – per every watchdog group that looked at this – exactly the strategy.

Lawyers Defending American Democracy said it plainly: the rule “offers no timelines under which a state could follow up,” and this is an administration that is very good at running out the clock.

The public comment period is open until April 6th at regulations.gov – docket number OAG199. Anyone can submit a comment, and they go into the official federal record.

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