Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita petitioned the state Supreme Court Thursday to stop threats to his law license over his pro-life legal efforts. It’s the latest development in years of abortion litigation and advocacy involving Congress, the White House, and ongoing media coverage that began in 2022, when Indiana abortionist Caitlin Bernard disclosed she’d committed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio.
Ever since he announced an investigation into Bernard after her story swiftly gained international attention, Rokita has fought abortion industry lawsuits and ethics challenges from pro-abortion lawyers. Rokita’s Thursday motion argues Indiana’s attorney Discipline Commission is retaliating against Rokita for speaking to voters about public issues, infringing on his state and national constitutional free speech rights, interfering in elections, violating the constitutional separation of powers, and violating state law banning Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (anti-SLAPP).
“The Commission’s latest attempt to discipline Respondent based on the exercise of his freedom of expression is blatantly unconstitutional. The First Amendment does not permit the Commission, as an agent of the state government, to punish Respondent, an elected public official, for his protected speech,” the complaint says.
In January, Discipline Commission staff chose to pursue a fresh ethics complaint against Rokita based on a 2024 press release he issued about another ethics complaint the two parties had just settled. It alleges he didn’t express enough remorse after settling the first complaint against factually accurate public prolife comments. The lawyers both filing charges against Rokita and evaluating those charges for the Indiana Supreme Court’s disciplinary commission have a long history of supporting far-left causes such as race and sex discrimination.
Indiana’s Supreme Court controls state lawyer licensing and ethics, and its Disciplinary Commission can choose not to pursue ethics complaints, as they are often filed to retaliate against a lawyer rather than expose wrongdoing. The commission’s investigation of this complaint included an eight-hour deposition with Rokita, “hours” of depositions of his communications and campaign staff, paging through internal emails about the disputed press release, and reviewing records from Rokita and staff’s work and personal phones, including private communications with their friends and family, the complaint says.
“It’s designed to put a chill on the attorney general’s speech,” said Jim Ammeen, Rokita’s lawyer, in a phone call with The Federalist Thursday. “… We’re not talking about dishonest conduct.”
Ethics Complaints Weaponized For Politics
Rokita’s motion says if the Supreme Court does not stop the commission’s “unconstitutional harassment” before the complaint proceeds further, he is legally entitled to seek discovery from the commission: “Respondent plans to seek relevant discovery from the Commission. Respondent is entitled to discover, among other things, whether the Disciplinary Complaint was ‘filed for an ulterior political end[.]'”
A footnote in the complaint says, “The Commission, its members, and staff are hereby put on notice of their duty to preserve all documents and communications in their possession, custody, or control (including on any personal email accounts) referring or relating to the press release, the Rules Proposal, or the pending disciplinary action against Respondent.”
Rokita is one of more than a dozen Republican state attorneys general and hundreds of Republican lawyers to face license challenges since 2020. Democrats created several organizations for the express purpose of harassing Republican lawyers with ethics charges motivated by politics rather than misconduct, including The 65 Project and Lawyers Defending Democracy. Ammeen and other Indiana lawyers faced ethics complaints for giving Rokita legal counsel, he said.
The right to an attorney, not to mention the constitutional right to freedom of speech, is fundamental to American rule of law and basic judicial fairness. Resolving an ethics complaint can cost attorneys at least $10,000 to $30,000 for simpler cases and many times that for more drawn-out cases such as Rokita’s, lawyers skilled in disciplinary cases have told The Federalist.
Is an ACLU Plaintiff Suing Prolifers an ‘Activist’?
The previous charges against Rokita arose after he said on TV that Bernard was “an abortion activist with a history of failing to report.” According to Vanity Fair, Bernard has a tattoo of a coat hanger — a symbol of abortions that kill two humans instead of one — and was a plaintiff in an unsuccessful 2019 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that attempted to force Indiana to allow abortions of babies old enough to survive outside the womb.
The commission alleged Rokita’s statement could influence legal proceedings against Bernard. Rokita settled that complaint, accepting a Supreme Court rebuke and paying $250 in court fees in exchange for ending the dispute. The commission then decided to pursue a second investigation extending the first instead of upholding its end of the dispute resolution and foregoing further litigation.
Bernard has starred in a massive pro-abortion media campaign defending her decision to commit an abortion on a 10-year-old girl from Ohio who was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Her disclosure of that case to an Indianapolis Star reporter gained international attention, including notice from then-President Joe Biden and profiles in publications including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She was also the guest of a California Democrat congresswoman for Biden’s last State of the Union address.
Disclosing the child’s tragic personal details also earned Bernard a reprimand from the Indiana medical licensing board and a $3,000 fine for violating patient privacy. She still has her medical license.
In 2022, Bernard sued Rokita for investigating her treatment of the Ohio child and recently sued to stop a policy Rokita’s office has backed, of following state law in releasing abortion records. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun, at Rokita’s urging, in January ordered the state health department to once again comply with state law and release those records. Rokita’s office will defend that state policy in court.
Earlier records of the kind Bernard is suing to conceal suggest Bernard may have failed to comply with state law when committing abortions. Two 2022 state records compiled by pro-life organization Voices for Life suggest Bernard may not have obtained proper patient consent for abortions. Another 2022 record from Bernard may have been filed later than the legal reporting requirement. Bernard’s lawsuit to prevent the continued disclosure of such records names Voices for Life as a defendant.
Highly Politicized Disciplinary Personnel
In the 2024 elections, Rokita was the largest vote-getter of all statewide candidates, winning re-election by nearly 18 points despite the charges against his law license. Rokita earned more votes than every other candidate on Indiana ballots, except for Donald Trump. Hoosier voters clearly weighed in strongly against procedural efforts to impede Rokita’s work as attorney general.
Some Indiana Republicans who oppose their party working on behalf of prolife voters used the license challenge to threaten a primary against Rokita in 2024. Abortion and the commission’s disciplinary action were central campaign planks for Rokita’s Democrat challenger, Destiny Wells.
At the time it began pursuing charges against Rokita, public records showed every Disciplinary Commission member with a record of political donations had donated to Democrat Party candidates. At the time, the board was also chaired by a Democrat prosecutor who publicly supported Wells in 2024 and has made numerous donations to other pro-abortion candidates.
Some new commission members have come aboard, but public records still show the majority has a history of political donations to Democrats. Several commission members also have financial connections to Bernard’s employer, Indiana University Health.
The commission is also now chaired by Peter Rusthoven. As The Federalist reported in October, “Rusthoven is a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter and Never Trumper who financially supported Joe Biden and Liz Cheney and endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. In Politico in February, Rusthoven endorsed removing Trump from the ballot, a legal effort a unanimous Supreme Court voted against in March. Trump endorsed Rokita in June.”
In 2021 and 2023 articles, the Disciplinary Commission’s executive director, Adrienne Meiring, endorsed the empirically disreputable concept of “implicit bias,” supported diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and suggested judges could attend Marxist-led racial grievance protests without calling their legal impartiality into question.
Three of the Indiana Supreme Court justices hearing Rokita’s complaint were subject to an unsuccessful effort to prevent their retention in office in 2024 because they upheld a strong pro-life law passed by Indiana’s legislature. Two Supreme Court justices dissented from Rokita’s first complaint agreement, saying they thought his prolife speech deserved a greater punishment. The state Supreme Court justices up for retention votes in 2024 earned higher vote margins but approximately one-third of Rokita’s vote totals.
“There are real, live, legal, and constitutional issues here that only the Supreme Court can decide,” Ammeen said.