Regulations & Advocacy

Proposed Rule, DOJ “Review of State Bar Complaints and Allegations Against Department of Justice Attorneys”

Submitted via Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov

Robert Hinchman, Senior Counsel
Office of Legal Policy
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW,
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Subject: Proposed Rule, U.S. Department of Justice, “Review of State Bar Complaints and Allegations Against Department of Justice Attorneys,” 91 Fed. Reg. 10780, Docket No. OAG199, AG Order No. 6653-2026-A, RIN 1105–AB82

Dear Mr. Hinchman,

Civil Service Strong (“CSS”), a project of Democracy Forward Foundation, is a national coalition committed to defending and strengthening a nonpartisan, professional civil service. CSS brings together labor organizations, civil society groups, former public servants, and good government advocates united by the core principle that the federal workforce must be governed by merit, not politics.

Campaign for Accountability (“CfA”) is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan, nonprofit watchdog organization that uses research, litigation, and aggressive communications to expose misconduct and malfeasance. In keeping with CfA’s mission, the organization files bar complaints against government lawyers who appear to violate state rules of professional conduct.

Those interests converge here. CSS’ commitment to a professional civil service and CfA’s work exposing government misconduct are both implicated by the Department of Justice’s proposed rule, “Review of State Bar Complaints and Allegations Against Department of Justice Attorneys,” 91 Fed. Reg. 10780 (Mar. 5, 2026). The proposal would allow DOJ to insert itself at the front end of bar-complaint proceedings against current and former Department attorneys, pause state bar disciplinary authorities while DOJ conducts an internal review, and threatens unspecified “appropriate action” if a bar declines to do so. It is unlawful, unsound, and dangerous to the professional civil service.

Congress enacted 28 U.S.C. § 530B (the McDade Amendment) in 1998 to make clear that government lawyers are not exempt from the ordinary ethical rules that govern the legal profession. The provision was a response to DOJ’s prior efforts to resist the application of certain state ethics rules to federal prosecutors and reflected Congress’s judgment that DOJ should not be left to police its own lawyers. Instead, Congress required that “An attorney for the Government shall be subject to State laws and rules, and local Federal court rules, governing attorneys … to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.” The proposal would undermine this statutory requirement.

The federal government depends every day on licensed professionals. Their obligations do not run solely to supervisors or political leadership but also to external standards that protect the public and preserve institutional integrity. That is true of physicians, engineers, accountants, and other credentialed professionals in government service. It is equally true of lawyers. A lawyer’s bar license is the professional authority that qualifies the lawyer to practice and that imposes enforceable duties of candor, competence, honesty, and independent judgment. The civil service has long treated attorney positions as distinctive precisely because attorney hiring depends on professional qualification and bar membership rather than ordinary competitive examination.

The proposed rule would impair that structure. In practical terms, it would allow the employer to step between licensed attorneys and the independent disciplinary systems that regulate every other lawyer. That shift away from external professional accountability and toward employer controlled review is contrary to law and bad civil service policy, especially at a moment when DOJ’s own treatment of career attorneys and ethics personnel is generating extraordinary concern.

This comment explains why. First, it places the proposal in the context of DOJ’s recent treatment of professional staff and ethics oversight, which makes the Department unfit to claim greater control over attorney discipline. Second, it shows that the proposal conflicts with 28 U.S.C. § 530B, the traditional state and judicial role in attorney discipline, and the best reading of the statute after Loper Bright v. Raimondo, 603 US 369 (2024). Third, it explains why the proposal is arbitrary and capricious because DOJ has not adequately justified the rule, confronted contrary evidence, or meaningfully considered narrower alternatives. Fourth, it explains why the proposed rule is bad policy because it is inconsistent with the role of licensed professionals in government and with the longstanding structure of federal attorney employment. Finally, it explains why the rule would harm professionalism in government, weaken the civil service, and shield against accountability.

I. DOJ’s Current Crisis of Professional Independence Undermines this Proposal

Before turning to DOJ’s proposal, it is useful to describe the ordinary system the Department is proposing to change. Historically, attorney-discipline issues involving DOJ lawyers have been handled through a layered but generally cooperative process. DOJ attorneys, like other lawyers, as explained below, are subject to the ethical rules of the jurisdictions in which they are licensed and practice. Internally, DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility has typically reviewed allegations of professional misconduct and, where appropriate, referred substantiated matters through the Department’s internal disciplinary channels.¹ But state bars and courts have remained free to investigate and act on their own authority, and any sequencing among those processes has generally occurred through informal coordination and professional courtesy.

The proposal would replace that practice with a much more assertive employer-controlled regime. As proposed, DOJ would formally place itself at the front end of bar-complaint proceedings involving current and former Department attorneys, seek to pause state bar investigations while DOJ conducts its own review, and threaten “appropriate action” if bar authorities do not stand down.² In other words, the rule would allow DOJ to delay and potentially obstruct independent disciplinary review by the very outside bodies that ordinarily regulate lawyers.

DOJ attempts to justify this proposal by invoking an allegedly unprecedented wave of politicized bar complaints.³ That explanation is farcical. To the extent that there has been heightened scrutiny of DOJ lawyers, the more obvious and accurate explanation is that the Department under this administration has behaved in troubling ways. It has fired or marginalized career lawyers associated with disfavored matters, weakened internal ethics safeguards, and accumulated repeated allegations of noncompliance, misrepresentation, and pressure on career attorneys to compromise professional judgment.

The recent pattern of personnel actions is telling. Early in 2025, DOJ fired more than a dozen lawyers who had worked on the criminal prosecutions of President Trump, reportedly because acting leadership concluded that they could not be trusted to “faithfully implement the President’s agenda” because of their prior service.⁴ Later reports described additional firings of attorneys and staff connected to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team.⁵ Those actions publicly signaled that legal work on politically unwelcome matters could itself become grounds for removal and that fidelity to law and facts may be treated as less important than political alignment.

The same pattern appears in the handling of internal ethics and professional oversight. A 34-year department veteran and its senior career ethics official resigned from his post after the Department pulled him off his duties and assigned him to a new sanctuary cities working group.⁶ Public reporting shows that he resigned after then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove commandeered ethics-related decisionmaking for political appointees, including his chief of staff who graduated from law school in 2021.⁷ A few weeks later, then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi fired the Director of DOJ’s Departmental Ethics Office, a career attorney who had spent nearly 20 years at the Department.⁸

Reporting also describes wider upheaval in and around DOJ’s accountability infrastructure including in the Office of Professional Responsibility.⁹ DOJ removed the head of OPR in the first weeks of the administration.¹⁰ More than a year later, the office’s website does not list a leader.¹¹ The Department therefore asks the public to trust expanded internal review of attorney discipline while simultaneously weakening its own internal ethics structure.

DOJ’s weakening of the Office of the Inspector General reinforces the point. Recent reporting describes an Inspector General’s office that has declined to investigate politically sensitive allegations involving senior DOJ leadership, even as former employees characterize that refusal as an abdication of its traditional oversight role.¹² The office has also faced leadership turnover, veteran departures, and budget-cutting pressure since Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s departure. This is part of the broader erosion of the Department’s independent internal checks.

The Department’s treatment of career attorneys is also troubling. In April 2025, senior Civil Rights Division attorneys were reportedly reassigned from long-established subject-matter portfolios as the Division was redirected under new leadership.¹³ By July 2025, reports indicate that nearly two-thirds of the lawyers in the Federal Programs Branch had resigned or announced plans to leave since the election, with sources citing ethical concerns, discomfort defending legally dubious positions, and fear of pressure to make misleading representations to courts.¹⁴

Directly relevant to the proposed rule, several said they left because they “feared they would be pressured to misrepresent facts or legal issues in court, a violation of ethics rules that could lead to professional sanctions.”¹⁵ That is not the profile of a well-functioning legal institution or professional culture.

Whistleblower allegations deepen the concern. In June 2025, a former DOJ attorney alleged that Bove pressured Department lawyers to disregard court orders relating to deportations under the Alien Enemies Act.¹⁶ The public whistleblower disclosure itself described “lack of candor, deliberate delay and disinformation” in the Department’s dealings with the judiciary.¹⁷ Members of Congress released texts and emails bolstering claims that DOJ leadership urged defiance of the courts and misled judges.¹⁸ Even apart from ultimate adjudication, allegations of this gravity underscore why it is dangerous to make DOJ the first and primary gatekeeper of ethics allegations against its own lawyers.

The Department’s current leadership has also become the subject of ethics complaints. Publicly filed complaints against Bondi allege that she and her senior team used the rhetoric of “zealous advocacy” to pressure subordinate DOJ attorneys to violate duties of candor, independent judgment and to punish those who refused.¹⁹ After Bove pressured DOJ lawyers to sign a motion dismissing criminal charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a watchdog group filed a bar complaint stating that, “Letting an elected official off the hook for serious, criminal charges in exchange for political support is textbook corruption and could be grounds for suspension of an attorney’s law license.”²⁰ The D.C. Bar, itself, filed ethics charges against Ed Martin, a senior DOJ official, accusing him of misconduct in seeking to punish Georgetown University’s law school.²¹ Nor is that all. Bar complaints have been filed against President Trump’s former personal counsel in the Department, including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche for “misconduct related to his interview of Ghislaine Maxwell,”²² and then-interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virgina, Lindsey Halligan, for her involvement in the James Comey matter,²³ as well as against many other politically-appointed DOJ officials. Those complaints reveal perhaps the true reason for this self-serving rule.

The judiciary’s responses to recent DOJ actions only strengthen that inference. Federal judges have repeatedly found, or strongly indicated, that the government violated court orders in several contexts. In the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a judge found probable cause to hold administration officials in criminal contempt for disregarding his order halting Venezuelan deportations.²⁴ In the District of Massachusetts, a judge found the government violated his order in the South Sudan deportation context.²⁵ And in separate litigation in the District of Maryland involving Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the court expressed concern with the government’s conduct, saying it was “extremely troubling” that the Trump-Vance administration failed to comply with its order to provide details on Garcia’s status following his deportation to El Salvador.²⁶ These are extraordinary judicial findings and warnings about executive noncompliance.

The broader pattern is more troubling still. A recent review of federal dockets reported at least 35 instances since August 2025 in which federal judges issued show-cause orders requiring the government to explain why it should not be punished for violating court orders in immigration cases.²⁷ The article reported that judges had castigated officials for dishonest testimony, inaccurate legal representations, and repeated failures to comply promptly with judicial directives. And in New Jersey alone, DOJ admitted violating judicial orders 52 times in immigration detention cases since December 5, 2025.²⁸ A senior DOJ official, in internal remarks, reportedly suggested some judicial rulings were “crazy” and that an adverse ruling was not a reason to stop doing what officials believed was right.

In short, DOJ seeks this rule at the extraordinary moment when career lawyers have been fired or reassigned for politically charged reasons, ethics oversight has been weakened, whistleblowers have alleged pressure to act unlawfully, and courts have identified repeated failures of candor, compliance, or both. The Department’s answer to this crisis should be more openness to independent oversight, not less.

II. The Proposed Rule is Contrary to Statute and the Traditional Discipline System for Attorneys

The rule is also contrary to the best reading of the governing statute. Congress, in 28 U.S.C. § 530B, mandates that “An attorney for the Government shall be subject to State laws and rules, and local Federal court rules, governing attorneys … to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys in that State.” The statute does not say “subject to the same rules, except rules regarding discipline.” A lawyer whose employer may require the state bar to stand down while the employer conducts an open-ended review is not being regulated in the same manner as every other lawyer.

For this proposal, DOJ appears to rely on subsection (b), which directs the Attorney General to “make and amend rules of the Department of Justice to assure compliance with this section.”²⁹ “Assure compliance” is naturally read to authorize internal rules that help government lawyers comply with externally applicable state bar obligations, not rules that postpone, deter, or obstruct those obligations. If Congress had wanted to permit DOJ to interpose itself between government lawyers and state disciplinary systems, it could have said so expressly. Instead, it chose parity language designed to ensure that government lawyers would be regulated like every other lawyer.

The history of the McDade Amendment confirms this reading. Congress enacted § 530B after DOJ had asserted that federal prosecutors were not bound by certain state ethics rules. In 1980, DOJ concluded that nothing in state and local federal court standards should be construed as an impediment to federal law enforcement efforts.³⁰ The House Government Operations Committee conducted hearings and recommended, among other things, a thorough examination of the ethics rules applicable to DOJ attorneys while expressing concern over “the problems inherent in any system of self-policing and regulation.”³¹ Frustrated by the perceived lack of an effective mechanism to curb prosecutorial abuse by federal prosecutors, Independent Counsel, and other DOJ attorneys, Congress added the McDade Amendment to DOJ’s 1998 appropriations act.³² DOJ’s present interpretation of the McDade Amendment effectively seeks to reclaim front-end control over disciplinary enforcement. That would turn the statute on its head.

Nor does DOJ receive special interpretive deference here. After Loper Bright, the question is what the statute means. The best reading is the ordinary one, that Congress required government attorneys to be subject to the same ethical systems, in the same way, as other lawyers.³³ DOJ’s contrary reading is not merely less persuasive, it is fundamentally at odds with the text Congress chose.

The proposed rule is also at odds with the long-settled precedent that licensing and discipline of attorneys are ordinarily state and judicial functions. In Leis v. Flynt, the Supreme Court explained that since the founding “the licensing and regulation of lawyers has been left exclusively to the States and the District of Columbia,” which “prescribe the qualifications for admission to practice and the standards of professional conduct” and “are responsible for the discipline of lawyers.”³⁴ In District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, the Court treated bar-admission decisions of the D.C. Court of Appeals as judicial acts, reflecting the judiciary’s central role in regulating the profession.³⁵ In Supreme Court of Virginia v. Consumers Union, the Court recognized the inherent power of a state supreme court to discipline attorneys.³⁶ And in In re Snyder, the Court explained that federal courts possess inherent authority over attorney discipline in their own proceedings, but also noted that the “uniform first step” for admission to federal court is admission to a state court and that federal courts may charge attorneys with knowledge of the ethical rules adopted by their home state.³⁷ The lesson here is that attorney discipline ordinarily operates through state licensing systems and courts exercising inherent disciplinary power.

That baseline matters here because DOJ has identified no clear congressional authorization to suspend or obstruct ordinary state bar disciplinary processes. DOJ’s effort to displace state and judicial authority from subsection § 530B’s instruction to “assure compliance” is untenable. In a field traditionally occupied by state bars, state supreme courts, and courts exercising inherent disciplinary authority, one would expect Congress to speak clearly before authorizing a federal agency to delay or derail state enforcement. Congress did not do so. DOJ not only failed to grapple with that lack of authority, it failed even to recognize the significant federalism concerns raised by its proposal, erroneously opining that the proposal “will not have substantial direct effects on the States, on the relationship between the National Government and the States, or on the distribution of power and responsibilities among the various levels of government.”³⁸

III. The Proposal is Not the Product of Reasoned Decisionmaking

The proposed rule is arbitrary and capricious. DOJ’s principal policy justification is that “political activists” have weaponized the bar-complaint process.³⁹ But the Department supplies little meaningful support for the claim that state bars are unable to screen out frivolous complaints, that the current system is broadly malfunctioning, or that open-ended internal DOJ review is necessary to protect legitimate advocacy. A generalized allegation of “weaponization” is not evidence. And it certainly is not enough to justify a sweeping rule that shifts power to the employer whose lawyers are under scrutiny.

DOJ also fails to confront the most obvious alternative explanation for any increase in complaints – its own conduct. As discussed above, DOJ in this administration has seen politically charged firings, weakened internal ethics oversight, whistleblower allegations of pressure to defy courts, judicial findings and warnings of noncompliance, and ethics complaints directed at senior leadership itself. In that setting, any rise in ethics complaints would not be proof of bad-faith complainants. It would instead reflect that outside accountability systems are responding to genuine professional breakdown. DOJ does not seriously engage with that possibility.

The rule also ignores the glaring conflict of interest at its core. In politically sensitive matters, DOJ leadership may have reputational, institutional, or political reasons to slow scrutiny or shape the factual record. Yet the proposal largely assumes that DOJ will neutrally and credibly police itself. That assumption is especially untenable considering the Department’s recent treatment of ethics officials and career attorneys.

Finally, DOJ fails to consider narrower alternatives. DOJ could have pursued targeted and cooperative procedures with bar authorities. Instead, it chose the bluntest tool available: an employer-first model with threatened enforcement against noncomplying bars. Failure to consider alternatives is a classic reasoned-decisionmaking defect.⁴⁰

IV. The Proposed Rule is Inconsistent with the Traditional Role of Licensed Professionals in Government and Would Harm the American People

Even if the proposal were lawful, it would be bad policy. A professional civil service depends on more than hiring and removal rules. It also depends on norms and institutions that enable career professionals to exercise independent judgment in accordance with law and professional duty. For lawyers, bar licensure is one of those institutions. It reminds both the individual lawyer and the lawyer’s supervisors that the attorney remains accountable to standards that the employer does not control.⁴¹

For DOJ lawyers, their professional role is inseparable from their public function. They represent the United States in court, exercise sovereign authority, advise officials on legal limits, and make representations that courts and the public must be able to trust. Those responsibilities demand not only competence and loyalty, but candor, restraint, and independent judgment. Some large bar associations make the point directly that government lawyers remain bound by the rules of professional conduct, may not substitute political expediency for legal duty, and may refuse instructions from superiors when compliance would violate ethical obligations.⁴²

The longtime structure of federal attorney employment reflects the same understanding about accountability to state bars. For almost 80 years, attorney positions have been treated differently from ordinary competitive-service jobs.⁴³ They have been excepted from civil service examinations because competitive examination is “not practicable” for their positions. Congress has repeatedly rejected ordinary civil-service examination for attorney positions and barred the Civil Service Commission, and later the Office of Personnel Management, from examining attorneys, reflecting a judgment that lawyer hiring should turn on professional credentials and individualized assessment rather than standardized competitive testing. Because of that Congressional judgment, and because federal attorney positions have historically required active bar membership,⁴⁴ the government has relied on external professional licensing and merit-based evaluation, not civil-service examination, as a principal safeguard of competence and professionalism. The special status of government lawyers cuts against this proposed rule, not in favor of it.

The public-trust consequences of this proposal are substantial. Legal-ethics scholarship has argued that attorney discipline helps uphold the rule of law, preserve the profession’s collective reputation, and hold lawyers accountable through visible disciplinary procedures.⁴⁵ Research on public perceptions of legal ethics likewise supports the importance of visible accountability mechanisms to confidence in legal institutions.⁴⁶ Recent scholarship on lawyers’ role in democratic erosion argues that, when lawyers are enlisted in efforts that threaten democratic norms, bar discipline may be one of the last remaining institutional guardrails.⁴⁷ That concern is especially salient when the lawyers at issue wield sovereign authority on behalf of the federal government.

Comparative public-administration research strongly supports this point. Studies emphasize that effective public administration in other countries requires a balance of autonomy and accountability, that some public functions require an arm’s-length relationship with their departments to function well, and that professionalization of the senior civil service is a key determinant of organizational performance.⁴⁸ Other work on the political-administrative boundary further explains that public services need protection against partisan misuse, need technical capacity that survives changes of administrations, and that public services can serve as a constraint helping ensure adherence to legal requirements regardless of political implications.⁴⁹ Those findings are directly relevant here. By shifting practical control over ethics accountability inward and toward political officials, the proposed rule weakens one of the external structures that helps DOJ lawyers function as professionals.

The same logic appears in the licensing systems of other professions. State medical boards, for example, do not merely register physicians – they discipline physicians whose conduct or competence warrants restriction, suspension, or revocation of the right to practice. The Federation of State Medical Boards describes physician discipline as part of state boards’ public protection mission, and medical-law literature likewise describes state boards as the institutions responsible for licensing and disciplining physicians.⁵⁰ A major point of those systems is that the employer does not control them. Once the employer can pause or redirect those systems in politically sensitive matters, the public loses part of the protection the licensing regime is supposed to provide. Lawyers are no different.

DOJ should not treat outside professional accountability as a nuisance to be managed away. Government and the American people depend on expertise and on the legitimacy that comes from licensing, credentialing, and obligations attached to professional status. The public is entitled to expect that a physician at the Department of Veterans Affairs remains answerable to medical standards,⁵¹ that a federal engineer remains answerable to engineering standards, and that a government lawyer remains answerable to the rules of state bars. The proposed rule therefore moves in the wrong direction.

V. The Breadth and Design of the Proposal Confirm its Shielding Function

Several features of the proposed rule confirm that it is best understood as a shield against accountability.

Most notably, the proposal sets no meaningful deadline for DOJ to complete its review of bar complaints. Some state disciplinary systems operate under statutes of limitations or other time constraints, so prolonged DOJ delay could prevent state authorities from completing investigations before their time to act expires. Even where no formal deadline lapses, delay can erode witness availability, dissipate public attention, and weaken accountability. The Office of Professional Responsibility, the DOJ office tasked by the proposal to handle these complaints, reportedly has fewer than three dozen employees⁵² and this administration fired OPR’s head last year without replacement. Under these circumstances, delay is not just possible, it’s foreseeable. A process with no real endpoint risks nonenforcement.

The rule’s extension to former DOJ attorneys is equally revealing.⁵³ If the proposal were genuinely about active personnel management or the orderly supervision of current employees, its logic would be strongest for current DOJ lawyers. But the proposed rule also covers former DOJ attorneys, a category for which managerial justifications are weakest and shielding concerns are strongest. That breadth supports the inference that the rule is about intercepting ordinary bar processes to shield lawyers from accountability, including those who have already left government service.

And the Department’s threat to take “appropriate action”⁵⁴ if state bars refuse to suspend their processes underscores the coercive nature of the proposal. In addition to creating a compromised review process, DOJ asserts the power to pressure outside disciplinary bodies not to perform their ordinary functions. That feature is difficult to reconcile with DOJ’s effort to portray the proposal as ordinary rulemaking.

Conclusion

The Department should withdraw the proposed rule. The rule is inconsistent with 28 U.S.C. § 530B, which requires that government attorneys be subject to state ethics rules to the same extent and in the same manner as other attorneys. It intrudes on a traditional state and judicial function without clear congressional authorization. It is arbitrary and insufficiently justified. And as a matter of policy, it would weaken one of the most important safeguards of professionalism in government service.

Government should value expertise and outside licensure when required. These independent professional obligations help keep public service lawful and credible. DOJ attorneys are licensed professionals, and the public is entitled to know that they remain fully answerable to the same external ethical systems that regulate every other lawyer. At a moment when the Department’s own conduct has generated extraordinary concern from whistleblowers, former officials, judges, and outside complainants, the answer is more accountability not more distance between DOJ lawyers and the bars that regulate them.

Respectfully submitted,

Robert H. Shriver, III
Managing Director
Civil Service Strong and Good Government Initiatives Democracy Forward Foundation

Michelle Kuppersmith
Executive Director
Campaign for Accountability

Endnotes

1
*See* 28 C.F.R. §§ 0.39, 0.39a.
2
*See* 91 Fed. Reg. at 10781, 10782, 10784.
3
*Id.* at 10782-83 (“This unprecedented weaponization of the State bar complaint process risks chilling the zealous advocacy by Department attorneys on behalf of the United States, its agencies, and its officers.”).
4
*See*, Sarah N. Lynch & Andrew Goudsward, Trump administration fires team of lawyers who prosecuted him, official says, Reuters (Jan. 27, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/trump-appointed-prosecutor-opens-internal review-justice-depts-jan-6-cases-wsj-2025-01-27.
5
Perry Stein, DOJ fires officials who worked on Jack Smith’s Trump investigations, Wash. Post (Jan. 27, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/27/doj-firings-trump-jack-smith-officials/; Alan Feuer & Devlin Barrett, Trump Administration Fires More D.O.J. Employees Who Worked for Special Counsel, NY Times (July 12, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/12/us/politics/justice-dept-jack-smith-firings.html.
6
Sarah N. Lynch, US Justice Department senior career ethics official removed from post, source says, Reuters, (Jan. 27, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-department-senior-career-ethics-official-removed-post source-says-2025-01-27/.
7
Sarah N. Lynch, Senior Justice Department ethics official resigns over sidelining by Trump appointees, source says, Reuters (Feb. 19, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/senior-justice-department-ethics-official-resigns-over sidelining-by-trump-2025-02-19/.
8
Ben Penn, Bondi Fires Her Personal Ethics Chief as DOJ Purge Continues, Bloomberg Law (July 13, 2025), https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/bondi-fires-her-personal-ethics-chief-as-doj-purge-continues.
9
91 Fed. Reg. at 10784.
10
Perry Stein, Shayna Jacobs, Carol D. Leonnig and Ann E. Marimow, Several top career officials ousted at Justice Department, Wash. Post (Mar. 7, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/03/07/justice department-trump-firings/.
11
*See* U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Professional Responsibility, https://www.justice.gov/opr.
12
Katelyn Polantz, DOJ whistleblower complains to Congress that internal watchdog isn’t doing its job, CNN (Mar. 30, 2026), https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/politics/doj-whistleblower-inspector-general-complaint.
13
Sarah N. Lynch & Dan Levine, US Justice Department reassigns about a dozen civil rights attorneys amid shakeup, say sources, Reuters (Apr. 22, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-justice-department-reassigns about-dozen-civil-rights-attorneys-amid-shakeup-2025-04-22/.
14
Andrew Goudsward, Two-thirds of the DOJ unit defending Trump policies in court have quit, Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/two-thirds-doj-unit-defending-trump-policies-court-have-quit-2025-07-14/.
15
*Id.*
16
Devlin Barrett, Justice Dept. Leader Suggested Violating Court Orders, Whistle-Blower Says, NY Times (June 24, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/us/politics/justice-department-emil-bove-trump-deportations reuveni.html; Rachel Leingang, DoJ leader suggested defying courts over deportations, whistleblower says, The Guardian (June 24, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/emil-bove-justice-department whistleblower.
17
*Id.*
18
Perry Stein & Jeremy Roebuck, Texts, emails bolster whistleblower account of DOJ defying court order, Wash. Post (July 10, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/07/10/emil-bove-reuveni-justice email-texts-whistleblower/
19
Lawyers Defending American Democracy, LDAD and Coalition Partners File an Ethics Complaint Against Attorney General Pamela Bondi, (June 5, 2025), https://ldad.org/letters-briefs/ethics-complaint-bondi.
20
American Oversight, American Oversight Files Bar Complaint Against Deputy AG Bove for Corrupt Actions in Dismissal of Eric Adams Charges, (Feb 20, 2025), https://americanoversight.org/american-oversight-files-bar complaint-against-deputy-ag-bove-for-corrupt-actions-in-dismissal-of-eric-adams-charges/.
21
Devlin Barrett, D.C. Bar Begins Disciplinary Proceedings Against Ed Martin, NY Times (Mar. 10, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/us/politics/dc-bar-ed-martin-disciplinary-hearing.html.
22
Legal Accountability Center, Bar Complaint Against Todd Blanche, (Sept. 11, 2025), https://legalaccountability.org/actions/complaint-against-todd-blanche.
23
Peter Charalambous, Watchdog group files bar complaint against prosecutor Lindsey Halligan over Comey, James cases, ABC News (Nov. 12, 2025), https://abcnews.com/US/watchdog-group-files-bar-complaint-prosecutor lindsey-halligan/story?id=127448129.
24
NPR Staff, Judge: ‘Probable cause’ to hold U.S. in contempt over Alien Enemies Act deportations, NPR (Apr. 16, 2025), https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/g-s1-60696/judge-contempt-alien-enemies-act.
25
Brandon Drenon & Kayla Epstein, Judge says US deportations to South Sudan violate court order, BBC News (May 21, 2025), https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c98990v5e1eo.
26
Blake Brittain & Tom Hals, Judge rebukes Trump administration, demands to know status of illegally deported man, Reuters (Apr. 11, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-orders-trump-administration-advise-its-steps return-wrongly-deported-2025-04-11/.
27
Mattathias Schwart, Zach Montague & Ernesto Londoño, Judges Grow Angry Over Trump Administration Violating Their Orders, NY Times (Feb. 23, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/us/politics/judges contempt-immigration-trump.html.
28
*Id.*; Mattathias Schwart, Zach Montague & Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Justice Dept. Acknowledges 52 Court Order Violations in New Jersey, NY Times (Feb. 18, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/18/us/trump-news.
29
91 Fed. Reg. at 10781, 10783-85.
30
Cong. Rsch. Serv., The McDade-Murtha Amendment: Ethical Standards for Federal Prosecutors (RL31221), (Dec. 18, 2001), https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL31221.html.
31
*Id.* at CRS-3 (citing H.Rept. 101-986, at 35 (1990)).
32
*Id.*
33
603 U.S. 369, 395-96 (2024).
34
439 U.S. 438, 442 (1979).
35
460 U.S. 462, 479-80 (1983) (“These precedents clearly establish that the proceedings in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals surrounding Feldman’s and Hickey’s petitions for waiver were judicial in nature. The proceedings were not legislative, ministerial, or administrative.”).
36
446 U.S. 719, 724 (1980) (“The Virginia Court, however, has additional enforcement power. As we have said, it asserts inherent power to discipline attorneys. Also, § 54–74 expressly provides that if the Virginia Court or any other court of record observes any act of unprofessional conduct, it may itself, without any complaint being filed by the State Bar or by any third party, issue a rule to show cause against the offending attorney. . . . [I]t is apparent that the Virginia Court and other courts in Virginia have enforcement authority beyond that of adjudicating complaints filed by others and beyond the normal authority of the courts to punish attorneys for contempt.”)
37
472 U.S. 634, 643-45 & n.6 (1985).
38
91 Fed. Reg. at 10786.
39
*Id.* at 10782.
40
*Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co.*, 463 U.S. 29, 43 (1983) (explaining that failure to “consider an important aspect of the problem” or explain a decisionmaking path so that it can be reasonably discerned makes a rule arbitrary and capricious).
41
Milton C. Regan, Jr., Zachary B. Hutchinson, & Juliet Aiken, Lawyer Independence in Context, N.Y. State Jud. Inst. (2016), https://www.nycourts.gov/LegacyPDFS/IP/jipl/pdf/CLEReganLawyerIndependenceinContext2016.pdf (explaining that “government lawyers are deemed to have a ‘higher, competing duty to act in the public interest.’ This means that, ‘[u]nlike a private practitioner, the loyalties of a government lawyer … cannot and must not lie solely with his or her client agency.’”).
42
*See, e.g.*, N.Y.C. Bar Ass’n, Formal Op. 2025-1, Ethical Responsibilities of Lawyers Representing Government Officers and Agencies (2025), https://www.nycbar.org/reports/formal-opinion-2025-1-ethical-responsibilities-of lawyers-representing-government-officers-and-agencies/.
43
*See, e.g.,* Treasury, Postal Service and General Appropriation Act, 1982, H.R. 4121, 97th Cong., 1st Sess. (1981); *Fiorentino v. United States*, 607 F.2d 963, 965-66 (Ct. Cl. 1979) (“It has long been known . . . that the Congress has been always opposed to Civil Service Commission (CSC) testing and examining of attorney positions in the Executive branch under the competitive system. . . . Whether the legislative intent is obvious to ‘outsiders,’ it certainly has been to the Executive branch, which has never, since May 1, 1947, put attorney positions anywhere but in the excepted service.”).
44
U.S. Off. of Pers. Mgmt., Guide For Federal Attorney Recruiting and Hiring, (Mar. 2026), https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/hiring-information/federal-attorney-recruiting-hiring/guide-for-federal attorney-recruiting-and-hiring.pdf (advising agencies to establish qualifications for attorney positions, including an active “bar membership in good standing of any U.S. jurisdiction” and further advising agencies how to verify that bar membership).
45
*See* Jennifer M. Kraus, Attorney Discipline Systems: Improving Public Perception and Confidence, 84 Marq. L. Rev. 273, 277(2000), https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1346\&context=mulr (“Separation of prosecution and adjudication within state discipline systems promotes a balanced process in two ways: it represents the interests of both the public and the attorneys under investigation and allows participation by a variety of groups, reducing the opportunities for error based on partiality. This check on attorney discipline systems is vital in ensuring that discipline systems protect both the public and the legal profession.”).
46
*See* Matthew Kim, For Appearance’s Sake: An Empirical Study of Public Perceptions of Ethical Dilemmas in the Legal Profession, 83 Ohio St. L.J. 529, 579-82 (2022), https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/sites/default/files/2022- 07/14.Kim\_v83-3\_pp529-599.pdf (arguing for an “appearance of impropriety” standard for attorney discipline because “The public consistently demands more of all members of the legal profession when dealing with a variety of common ethical dilemmas that do not violate the ethics rules.”).
47
Alex Goldstein, The Attorney’s Duty to Democracy: Legal Ethics, Attorney Discipline, and the 2020 Election, 35 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 737, 739 (2022), https://www.law.georgetown.edu/legal-ethics-journal/in-print/volume-35- issue-4-fall-2022/the-attorneys-duty-to-democracy-legal-ethics-attorney-discipline-and-the-2020-election/ (“One possible, but unexpected, institution that could serve as a guardrail for America’s struggling democracy is the legal profession; specifically, the legal ethics regime, which includes the American Bar Association, state bar committees, state judiciaries, and other institutions that enforce legal ethics rules.”).
48
Org. for Econ. Co-operation and Dev., Organisation of Public Administration: Agency Governance, Autonomy and Accountability, (2021), https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2021/10/organisation of-public-administration-agency-governance-autonomy-and-accountability\_054558d8/07316cc3-en.pdf (“The organisational setup of public administration matters for its performance. The Principles of Public Administration recognise the importance of this issue by stating that the overall organisation of central government should be rational, based on adequate policies and regulations and provide for appropriate internal, political, judicial, social and independent accountability.”).
49
Org. for Econ. Co-operation and Dev., Study on the Political Involvement in Senior Staffing and on the Delineation of Responsibilities Between Ministers and Senior Civil Servants, (2007), https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2007/07/study-on-the-political-involvement-in senior-staffing-and-on-the-delineation-of-responsibilities-between-ministers-and-senior-civil servants\_g17a199d/136274825752.pdf (“Public service institutions do not have authority over political institutions, but they do act as a quasi-constitutional constraint on those institutions. Legitimacy derives from adherence to constitutional and legal requirements, regardless of the implications for the elected government.”).
50
Fed’n of State Med. Bds., *supra*.
51
*See, e.g.*, Fed’n of State Med. Bds., About Physician Discipline, https://www.fsmb.org/u.s.-medical-regulatory trends-and-actions/guide-to-medical-regulation-in-the-united-states/about-physician-discipline; U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs, VA National Standards of Practice, https://www.va.gov/STANDARDSOFPRACTICE/faq.asp\#:\~:text=Yes%2C%20all%20licensed%20providers%20wi thin%20VHA%20must,action%20against%20a%20VA%20health%20care%20professional. At the VA, all licensed medical providers “must maintain their state licensure as a condition of employment. If they allow their license to lapse, have their license revoked, or relinquish their license in lieu of revocation, they may be immediately terminated from VA employment.”
52
Katelyn Polantz, *supra.*
53
*See* 91 Fed. Reg. at 10780, 10782.
54
*Id.* at 10781 (“[T]he Department shall take appropriate action to prevent the bar disciplinary authorities from interfering with the Attorney General’s review of the allegations.”).

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