25

John Krull

This column was originally published by TheStatehouseFile.com

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
February 24, 2025

In his latest attempt to escape the consequences of his own foolishness and cruelty, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita offers a curious defense.

And makes an even more curious admission.

Rokita and his pricey, pricey taxpayer-funded legal team filed a motion to dismiss the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission’s latest disciplinary charges against him. In that motion, the attorney general argues that he’s a politician all the time.

And an attorney … only when it suits him.

His contention, stripped of its outlandish flourishes, is that requiring him to abide by the rules of conduct other lawyers do squelches his First Amendment rights as a political candidate.

What’s more, he has these rights and other attorneys—such as the members of the disciplinary commission—do not. Just why this is so, Rokita and his ever-expanding squad of outside lawyers paid for by us do not explain.

That is but one of the odd things about Rokita’s odd, odd motion.

It opens with a tortured defense of the event that got Rokita into trouble this time around.

A little more than a year ago, Rokita received a Christmas gift of a punishment from the Indiana Supreme Court—no law license suspension, no fine, just a mild tut-tut—for making defamatory remarks about an Indiana doctor who performed a legal abortion for a 10-year-old Ohio girl who had been raped. It was the sort of ethical transgression that likely would have earned any other Indiana attorney a suspension or, possibly, a disbarment.

Rokita should have accepted the gift with grace or at least silence.

Instead, he issued a defiant statement in which he said he didn’t mean what he’d said in an affidavit he signed. In the affidavit, Rokita acknowledged, under penalty of perjury, that he couldn’t successfully defend himself against the commission’s charges.

His about-face on the affidavit prompted another investigation by the disciplinary commission—the second of at least three—into Rokita’s conduct.

Rokita’s expensive legal team—don’t worry, he’s capped the total cost to us for employing all three firms he’s hired on our dime at just under $20 million—wastes a lot of time and ink trying to wriggle out of the mess the attorney general made by saying he had his fingers crossed when he signed the affidavit.

Where their verbiage isn’t confusing, it is opaque.

At the end, though, their argument calls to mind Abraham Lincoln’s famous riposte to Stephen Douglas. Lincoln said Douglas wanted gullible listeners to believe that a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut were the same thing.

After delivering their horse chestnut of legal reasoning, Rokita’s legal battalion rings the cash register some more to deliver the heart of their argument.

There are two prongs to their attack.

The first is that it is wrong, wrong, wrong to expect Todd Rokita to conduct himself the way an ethical attorney would because he’s really a career politician who occasionally masquerades as a lawyer. This section of the motion makes clear that Rokita’s priority always is to deliver pronouncements on political issues and not to represent the interests of his clients, the people of Indiana.

The second reveals how desperate he is.

He threatens to go after the individual members of the disciplinary commission if they do not withdraw their complaint. He contends, not at all persuasively, that the members of the commission have conflicts of interest regarding him—and even cites the commission chair’s recusal, the honorable thing to do when one has a conflict, as evidence of this vast conspiracy to get him.

What neither Rokita nor his legal team seem to grasp is that these two sections amount to a tacit admission of the commission’s charges against him.

Instead of demonstrating that he didn’t do what the commission says he did, the attorney general and his spendthrift legal squad argue that no one, not even the commission or the court, should be allowed to notice that he’d done something wrong.

And even if they do notice, they shouldn’t say it … or rule on it.

That’s not a lawyer’s argument.

It’s a politician’s.

But Rokita’s motion makes clear that a politician is what he is, first, foremost and always.