By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com
October 5, 2026
It’s time to give credit where credit is due.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has genuine gifts.
He is spectacularly good at wasting time, squandering taxpayers’ money, starting silly fights and wallowing in self-pity.
On the negative side, though, he has no gift at all for exercising common sense. The poor fellow doesn’t seem to have the wisdom God gave a pet rock.
Rokita’s latest foray into foolishness is his decision to sue the past and present members and the executive director of the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission.
His public relations argument for doing so is that the commission targeted him for exercising his First Amendment right to speak his mind.
Reading his complaint in detail, though, makes clear what his real grievance is. The commission hurt his feelings by examining his most questionable actions.
And, because Rokita is a tender-hearted fellow, he doesn’t like having his feelings hurt.
Rokita’s suit elevates his self-destructive stupidity to superhuman levels.
For one thing, it documents for public consumption that Rokita’s fellow lawyers have been filing complaints about his conduct as often as most people change their socks. Our attorney general has been accused of unprofessional and unethical conduct almost as often as Al Capone was.
Rokita says the complaints were partisan ones filed by Democrats.
The record that he just made public, though, establishes that some of those complaints came from his fellow Republicans who were concerned about his tendency to use the powers of his office to pursue personal goals, political or otherwise.
That point was underscored by the latest ethical lapse, a legal action filed by the attorney general’s office—at taxpayer expense—against a guy who sold Rokita a jet ski.
The guy says he told Rokita—who apparently struggles with both listening and learning—to wear the jet ski in slowly and not run at full speed immediately.
What did Rokita do?
Ran it at full speed right away, broke it and then demanded that the guy give him back his money. The guy refused to give the refund but helped pay for the repairs.
Our brilliant attorney general then ran the jet ski at full speed once more—and broke it once more.
Again, he demanded a refund.
When he didn’t get one, he allegedly used the attorney general’s office to coerce the guy into coughing up $11,012.33.
So, now we taxpayers are in a dispute over a jet ski Rokita wasn’t smart enough to operate.
But his lawsuit establishes that wasting our money is a pattern with him.
It documents that he spent nearly a half-million taxpayer dollars paying outside lawyers to represent him in his previous disciplinary investigations.
Most of those—starting with his Inspector Javert-like persecution of Dr. Caitlin Bernard for performing a legal abortion for a 10-year-old Ohio girl who’d been raped—could have been avoided if Rokita had exercised the acumen possessed by the average banana slug. Repeatedly, our attorney general has found ways to elevate his screw-ups into disasters.
And then billed us for his errors in judgment.
The Indiana Supreme Court slyly and subtly pointed that out in its response to Rokita’s filing.
Normally, the court said, the attorney general would represent the disciplinary commission if it were sued.
But in this case, because Rokita is suing, both the attorney general’s office and the disciplinary commission will have to retain outside counsel.
That ringing sound you hear is the cash registers clanging for lawyers on both sides of this idiotic dispute.
And the whooshing sound is the money flying from taxpayers’ pockets to fund this adventure in idiocy.
So, what we have here is an attorney general who has spent and will continue to spend good taxpayer money to establish a record that he’s violated the ethical standards of the legal profession with regularity and that he’s willing to put the state’s legal establishment on war footing over a jet ski he wasn’t bright enough to operate properly.
What’s more, he’s backing into a corner an Indiana Supreme Court that has tied itself in logical and legal knots trying to avoid having to discipline him as it would any other attorney so that, to defend themselves, the justices may not have any choice but to drop the hammer on him.
One is tempted to call Todd Rokita a moron.
But doing so would be both unfair and unkind to morons everywhere.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Also, the views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.
