The Legal Accountability Center filed a bar complaint on Tuesday against Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, along with two of her lieutenants, Carlton Davis and Steven Vandervelden. The alleged ethical breach is one we have all watched belly-flop in real time — the office’s doomed campaign to indict six Democratic lawmakers for appearing in a video that reminded active-duty service members they are legally obligated to disregard unlawful orders.
That is not a spicy interpretation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Which is presumably why the DOJ could not name the statute any of them had supposedly broken. The career prosecutors in Pirro’s office also wanted no part of it, so she imported a ringer: Vandervelden, a retired Westchester hand she pulled out of a dance photography studio to run the presentation. The grand jury declined the performance. That’s right: when Pirro’s office hauled Sens. Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin and four House Democrats before a grand jury… said grand jury did not bite, returning a no-bill.
The complaint, lodged with the grievance committee in New York, where Pirro is licensed, argues that her directive to bring the case was “unwarranted, frivolous, and would serve merely to harass or maliciously injure” the lawmakers, and that as a government prosecutor she knew or should have known it had no basis. That tracks the rules of professional conduct governing frivolous filings and a prosecutor’s special duty not to pursue charges she knows aren’t backed by probable cause. As co-founder Michael Teter put it, prosecutors have “an obligation to exercise independent legal judgment rather than use the criminal justice system to carry out a president’s political demands.”
Pirro’s office is unmoved. A spokesperson insisted it’s a grand jury’s job, not a prosecutor’s, to decide whether to indict, and that “attempting to weaponize the disciplinary process against prosecutors for doing their jobs amounts to nothing more than a frivolous complaint.”
Listen, bar discipline is pretty much the last accountability mechanism standing for this administration’s lawyers — expansive immunity forecloses most of the criminal consequence and pardons potentially mop up the rest, with qualified immunity burying the civil suits. The DOJ knows it, which is why Pam Bondi has spent months trying to pry state bars loose from their jurisdiction over government lawyers and floating a federal rule to do it by fiat. You don’t spend that kind of effort neutering a regulator you think is toothless. And the last person to hold Pirro’s job, Ed Martin, caught a complaint of his own — the D.C. Bar’s reward being an ex parte meltdown for the ages.
Pirro, for her part, is already in a defensive crouch. She tapped out of the felony prosecution of the Olympian accused of touching Trump’s beloved Reflecting Pool, and the White House has been openly wondering aloud whether she’s worth keeping. A grievance file is not what you want landing while the boss is already asking whether you choked.
Earlier: Jeanine Pirro Brought In Dance Photographer To Prosecute Lawmakers And It Went Exactly As You’d Expect
Trump DOJ Can’t Answer, ‘What Law Did My Client Allegedly Break?’
New Ethics Complaint Reminds Florida Bar That Pam Bondi Isn’t Attorney General Anymore
Bondi Says She’s The Bar Now
How Much Misconduct Is Jeanine Pirro Willing To Do To Save Her Job?
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1
