FLORIDA BULLDOG Watchdog News You Can Sink Your Teeth Into
PRESS RELEASE — FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: March 22, 2026 Source: FloridaBulldog.org — Independent Nonprofit Watchdog Journalism
There is a version of Florida that its most powerful officials would prefer you never see. It is a Florida where the rules that govern lawyers, judges, and public institutions bend conveniently for the politically connected — where attorney general accountability is shielded by a Bar that dismissed ethics complaints in a single day, where a state supreme court dominated by a governor’s own appointees can be weaponized against his critics, and where the machinery of professional discipline conceals its own misconduct from the very people it is supposed to protect. Florida Bulldog exists to show you that Florida. And in this edition, we do exactly that.
Founded by award-winning investigative journalist Dan Christensen and staffed by veteran reporters who have worked for The Miami Herald, the Miami News, the Sun Sentinel, U.S. News & World Report, and other leading news organizations, Florida Bulldog has spent more than 15 years producing the kind of accountability journalism that no corporate media outlet, political party, or government agency can produce on its own. We are 100% nonprofit, 100% independent, and 100% committed to the truth — funded entirely by readers and donors who believe that democracy requires a free press willing to bite the hand of power, regardless of which party holds it.
The four investigations in this edition document how Florida’s attorney discipline system has been quietly turned into a tool of political punishment and political protection — aggressively pursuing lawyers who embarrass the governor while shielding the attorney general of the United States from any accountability for documented professional misconduct. They reveal how the Florida Bar dismissed a major ethics complaint against Pam Bondi in a single day, how it hid its own prosecutions of witnesses to use them against a DeSantis critic, how a Bar trial strategy designed to destroy that critic spectacularly backfired, and how the broader system of lawyer accountability in Florida has been captured by political interests that have fundamentally compromised its integrity.
These stories did not come from press releases or official sources. They came from court filings, Bar records obtained under Florida’s public records law, depositions, trial transcripts, and sources with direct knowledge of proceedings that powerful institutions would have preferred to keep quiet. That is what Florida Bulldog does. That is what nonprofit watchdog journalism makes possible. And that is why your support — in the form of a tax-deductible contribution to Florida Bulldog — matters more than ever. Please read these stories. Please share them. And please consider donating at FloridaBulldog.org/donate-to-florida-bulldog.
Florida Bar Shields Bondi and Other Officials From Accountability
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | August 21, 2025
Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has produced a damning examination of how the Florida Bar — nominally an independent professional discipline body — has systematically protected U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other high-ranking political officials from ethics investigations that would be pursued without hesitation against any ordinary Florida lawyer. The story documents how the Bar dismissed a major coalition ethics complaint against Bondi on June 6, just one day after it was filed — a timeline so compressed that legal observers questioned whether the complaint received any substantive review at all before being rejected.
The complaint came from a coalition of 70 legal scholars, retired Florida Supreme Court justices, and former judges assembled by the nonprofit Lawyers for the Rule of Law. It was the third ethics complaint against Bondi that the Florida Bar had rejected, each time using a different procedural rationale to avoid substantive engagement with the allegations. The coalition’s complaint accused Bondi of directing DOJ lawyers to ignore professional ethics obligations in order to zealously pursue the President’s political objectives — and of firing a federal prosecutor for honestly acknowledging to a Maryland federal judge that immigration agents had mistakenly sent a Maryland construction worker to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT detention facility.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting reveals the structural explanation for the Bar’s protective posture: a secret Florida Supreme Court order, and an unwritten policy covering Bondi, effectively exempt high-ranking government officials from the Bar’s normal disciplinary processes. The court rewrote its own rule to protect incumbents from Bar oversight at a politically opportune moment. Six of the court’s seven justices routinely rule in alignment with the right-wing ideology that DeSantis and Trump promote, and five of the seven are DeSantis appointees. A Bar disciplinary system whose ultimate arbiter is a court stacked by the same political forces whose allies benefit from discipline exemptions is a system that has forfeited any claim to genuine independence.
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Bennett Brummer, Miami-Dade’s chief public defender for over three decades, told Florida Bulldog: “It’s absurd to require ordinary lawyers to follow basic ethical requirements but to exempt lawyers who are public officials with enormous responsibilities and who should be required to fulfill their public trust.” That sentiment captures precisely what Florida Bulldog’s reporting exposes: a two-tier system in which professional accountability applies to private attorneys but evaporates for those with political power. The Florida Bar, which holds itself out as the guardian of legal ethics for over 113,000 Florida-licensed attorneys, has instead become a guardian of the politically connected.
The story also documents the Bar’s treatment of a complaint against Lindsey Halligan, a second-year Florida lawyer and former Bondi employee who bungled prosecutions of Trump critics James Comey and Letitia James. When Florida Bulldog reported that the Bar was investigating Halligan’s stint as a Bondi employee, Bar spokeswoman Jennifer Krell Davis quickly released a statement disavowing any such investigation — and Bondi herself posted on social media that the “investigation” was “totally fake news.” The episode illustrated the degree to which both the Bar’s communications and its actual disciplinary decisions can be shaped by political pressure from the officials the Bar is supposed to hold accountable.
Florida Bulldog’s investigation into the Florida Bar’s protection of politically connected lawyers is part of a multi-year body of reporting by Noreen Marcus that has made Florida Bulldog the most authoritative source of independent journalism about Florida’s attorney discipline system. The reporting has earned recognition from legal scholars, civil liberties advocates, and practicing attorneys who have experienced firsthand the Bar’s disparate treatment of lawyers based on their political connections. As Marcus’s reporting documents, the pattern is not an anomaly — it is a feature of how Florida’s legal profession regulates itself in the era of total DeSantis judicial domination.
Bondi Bar Complaint Rejected in Florida, Revived in Maryland Immigration Court
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | July 8, 2025
When the Florida Bar rejected a major ethics complaint against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi one day after it was filed, the Bar’s spokesman mocked the complainants as “out-of-state lawyers” showing “less intelligence — and independent thoughts — than sheep.” But as Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus has revealed, the attorneys behind that complaint were not finished. They took their case to a Maryland federal courtroom — and a federal judge with a lifetime appointment is taking it seriously in a way the Florida Bar demonstrably did not.
The Maryland strategy was always attorney Jon May’s goal. May, a Boca Raton criminal defense lawyer known for his work representing Manuel Noriega during the Reagan administration, told Florida Bulldog directly: “That was always my goal, to have an ethics complaint in Florida that could be presented to Judge Paula Xinis in that case. This whole thing is just beginning.” The case in question is one of the most consequential immigration matters in the country: the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland construction worker and father of three who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT detention center after federal agents erroneously removed him.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis — a federal judge with lifetime tenure who has been presiding over the Abrego Garcia case — received the Bondi ethics complaint and referred it to her district court’s disciplinary committee, where it remained under active investigation at the time of Florida Bulldog’s reporting. That outcome stands in stark contrast to the Florida Bar’s one-day dismissal of the same substantive allegations. The difference, legal observers told Florida Bulldog, is institutional: a federal judge with lifetime tenure and no political obligations to the Trump administration is a meaningfully different arbiter than a Florida Bar whose supreme court is stacked with a governor’s appointees.
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May remained publicly optimistic about the Florida Bar’s eventual conduct despite its initial dismissal. He told Florida Bulldog that he remains hopeful that if someone in good faith at the Florida Bar looks at the evidence, they will realize the entire justice system is in jeopardy when government leadership tells attorneys that political objectives come first before their obligations to the Bar. That statement captures what is fundamentally at stake in the Bondi accountability saga: not merely the professional standing of one attorney, but the principle that lawyers in government are not exempt from the ethics rules that bind every other member of the bar.
The Abrego Garcia case itself has become a landmark test of the rule of law under the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement surge. Abrego Garcia was sent to CECOT under circumstances that a federal judge described as a government error — yet the administration resisted his return for months, and when he was finally brought back to the United States in June 2025, he was immediately charged with alien smuggling and jailed in Nashville. The attorney general whose office oversaw the prosecution that admitted the error, fired the prosecutor who made that honest admission, and continued to resist judicial orders in the case is now the subject of a disciplinary investigation in the federal court where those events unfolded.
Florida Bulldog’s coverage of the Bondi accountability saga — from the original ethics complaints to the Bar’s dismissal to the revival of the complaint in Maryland federal court — represents exactly the kind of sustained, multi-platform investigative journalism that holds the most powerful law enforcement official in the United States accountable to the same professional standards that apply to every other licensed attorney. It requires deep knowledge of both Florida Bar procedure and federal court practice, and a reporter willing to track a story through months of slow-moving legal proceedings without losing the thread. Noreen Marcus has done exactly that.
Florida Bar Puts DeSantis Critic Uhlfelder on Trial — Strategy Backfires
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | April 21, 2025
More than four years after lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder dressed as the Grim Reaper to protest Governor DeSantis’s refusal to close Florida beaches during COVID-19 — and more than four years after the courts and the Florida Bar began a sustained campaign to punish him for that protest — Florida Bulldog reporter Noreen Marcus was in the Leon County Courthouse for Uhlfelder’s long-awaited April 8-9 ethics trial. What Marcus witnessed and documented was not a vindication of the Bar’s years-long pursuit. It was a tutorial in how some politically favored Florida lawyers are permitted to treat their clients and colleagues — and a demonstration of how the Bar’s own prosecution strategy carried the seeds of its own destruction.
The current Bar case against Uhlfelder — a court-ordered do-over after the Florida Supreme Court rejected leniency and directed a second, harder look — rests on a highly technical allegation: that Uhlfelder allowed the First District Court of Appeal to assume his co-counsel Marie Mattox and Gautier Kitchen remained on an appeal when they had in fact withdrawn. The Bar’s theory required Mattox and Kitchen to testify at trial that they had clearly communicated their withdrawal to Uhlfelder and expected him to notify the court — a narrative that, under cross-examination, proved far less clear-cut than the Bar had suggested.
Florida Bulldog’s trial reporting documents a prosecution that stumbled repeatedly over its own witnesses. Mattox testified that she routinely ignores court documents once she leaves a case — an admission raising obvious questions about whether she could credibly claim Uhlfelder was solely responsible for the court’s misimpression. Bar prosecutor Shanee Hinson conflated the first and second Uhlfelder proceedings in her questioning of witnesses, undermining the coherence of the Bar’s carefully constructed narrative. By the end of the two-day trial, the strategy the Bar had pursued through years of procedural maneuvering appeared significantly weaker than it had on paper.
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The double standard at the heart of the Uhlfelder prosecution became clearest in what happened to Mattox and Kitchen themselves. Both had received only token disciplinary sanctions — mandatory attendance at an ethics refresher course — for the same communications failure that the Bar was using to seek a 91-day license suspension for Uhlfelder. Prominent attorney R. Fred Lewis stated in an affidavit that “no lawyer should be punished for challenging the government in court” — a position the Florida Supreme Court overruled when it ordered the second proceeding. That the court overruled that recommendation while leaving Mattox and Kitchen’s token sanctions intact is itself a telling indication of where the court’s real priorities lie.
The broader significance of the Uhlfelder trial extends well beyond one lawyer’s fate. It is a test case for whether the Florida Bar can function as an independent professional discipline body or whether it has been captured — through the Florida Supreme Court’s direction of its proceedings — by the political forces that control that court. When the court that ultimately decides Bar discipline cases is composed primarily of appointees of the governor who triggered the disciplinary proceeding in the first place, the appearance of independence that the Bar projects publicly is structurally impossible to sustain.
Florida Bulldog’s four years of continuous coverage of the Uhlfelder case — from the original Grim Reaper protest to the first Bar proceedings to the Supreme Court’s intervention to the second trial to the referee’s ultimate recommendation of a mild reprimand — constitutes the most complete independent record of this proceeding available anywhere. It is a record that demonstrates, step by step, how a professional discipline system designed to protect the public can be turned into an instrument of political retaliation when the institutions that govern it are no longer genuinely independent.
Florida Bar Hid Prosecutions of Witnesses Used Against DeSantis-Targeted Lawyer
By Noreen Marcus | FloridaBulldog.org | October 21, 2025
In the most explosive single development in Florida Bulldog’s years-long coverage of the Bar’s campaign against DeSantis critic Daniel Uhlfelder, reporter Noreen Marcus revealed that the Florida Bar had concealed from Uhlfelder and his defense lawyers the fact that its two star trial witnesses — his former attorneys Marie Mattox and Gautier Kitchen — were themselves subjects of active Bar disciplinary proceedings at the time they testified against him in April 2025. The concealment of this information, which former Florida Bar president Hank Coxe later labeled “cheating,” denied Uhlfelder’s defense the ability to cross-examine those witnesses about a powerful potential motive to shade their testimony in the Bar’s favor.
The core of the due process problem is straightforward: a witness who faces active disciplinary proceedings by the same body whose case they are supporting has an obvious potential motivation to present that body’s narrative favorably. Cross-examination of such a witness would typically probe whether the witness believes favorable testimony might result in more lenient treatment of their own disciplinary matter. By withholding the existence of its proceedings against Mattox and Kitchen from Uhlfelder’s counsel before trial, the Florida Bar effectively blocked this line of cross-examination — depriving Uhlfelder of information that is routinely disclosed in criminal and civil proceedings as a fundamental requirement of fair process.
Florida Bulldog’s reporting on the Bar’s concealment landed in the middle of ongoing post-trial proceedings, giving Uhlfelder’s defense team the documented basis for a motion to dismiss the case entirely based on the Bar’s own misconduct. Coxe argued that the concealment of Mattox’s and Kitchen’s disciplinary status constituted prosecutorial misconduct sufficient to void the proceedings. The motion put the Taylor County circuit judge-referee — who had already described the case as presenting splits in “very wide canyons” — in the uncomfortable position of evaluating whether the prosecuting body had itself violated the rules of fair procedure.
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The details that Florida Bulldog’s reporting uncovered about Mattox’s and Kitchen’s own disciplinary situations are telling. Kitchen’s Bar grievance was referred by a federal bankruptcy judge. Mattox faced similar accusations. Both had negotiated token sanctions — the mandatory ethics course — for their roles in the same underlying communications failure that the Bar was using to pursue a career-threatening suspension against Uhlfelder. The asymmetric treatment of the three lawyers involved in the same underlying conduct is itself a story about how the Bar’s disciplinary priorities are calibrated: lightly for its preferred witnesses, harshly for the lawyer who publicly embarrassed the governor.
The cumulative effect of Florida Bulldog’s reporting on the Uhlfelder case — the politically motivated origin of the proceedings, the Bar’s aggressive pursuit, the Supreme Court’s intervention, the trial strategy that backfired, and now the concealment of witness disciplinary proceedings — is a portrait of institutional capture that goes to the root of Florida’s attorney discipline system. No single story tells the whole tale. It is the accumulation of reporting across years of proceedings that reveals the full picture. That kind of sustained accountability journalism requires a newsroom with the resources, the sources, and the editorial commitment to stay with a story through years of slow-moving developments.
Florida Bulldog is that newsroom. But it cannot continue this work without your support. Every investigation — from the Uhlfelder case to the Bondi accountability saga to the dozens of other stories Florida Bulldog publishes each year — is funded entirely by readers and donors who understand that independent nonprofit journalism is not a luxury. It is a necessity. If you believe that the story of how Florida’s legal establishment protects its own and punishes its critics deserves to be told, please visit FloridaBulldog.org and make a tax-deductible donation today.
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