There is a rule that every first-year law student learns, stated plainly in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and repeated in every bar admission jurisdiction in the country: a lawyer shall not make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal, and shall not fail to disclose facts to a tribunal when disclosure is required by law. It is Rule 3.3. It is not obscure. It is not ambiguous. It is the foundational obligation that separates the adversarial system from something more chaotic and dangerous — the baseline promise that whatever else lawyers may disagree about, they will not lie to the judges in front of whom they appear.
In late April 2026, a senior Justice Department attorney in Rhode Island broke that rule. The consequences were not abstract: a man wanted for murder walked out of custody. And when the judge who had ordered his release discovered what had happened, the government's response was not contrition — it was an attack on the judge herself.
What Kevin Bolan Did Not Tell Judge DuBose
Bryan Rafael Gomez is a citizen of the Dominican Republic who had been arrested in Rhode Island on assault and battery charges and subsequently transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody pending deportation proceedings. His attorneys challenged his detention in federal court, filing a habeas petition before U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, an appointee of former President Joe Biden sitting in Providence.
What Judge DuBose did not know when she considered Gomez's petition was that since 2023, the Dominican Republic had maintained an active warrant for his arrest on a charge of homicide. That warrant existed. It had been publicly disclosed in an ICE press release dated April 16, 2026 — more than a week before Bolan filed the government's response to Gomez's habeas petition. ICE knew about the warrant. The Department of Homeland Security knew about the warrant. And Kevin Bolan, who leads the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Rhode Island and who prepared the government's legal response, was told by ICE officials not to disclose it.
He complied. He filed his response on April 27 without mentioning the warrant. Judge DuBose, relying on the government's incomplete submission, ordered Gomez released on bond on April 28. Two days later, the Department of Homeland Security published a press release on its official website calling DuBose an "activist Biden judge" who had knowingly freed "a violent criminal illegal alien who is wanted for murder."
The assertion was a fabrication — one made possible only because the government's own lawyers had withheld the murder warrant from the court in the first place.
The Hearing: An Apology That Wasn't Enough
When the concealment was discovered, Bolan acknowledged it in court filings and, at a two-day hearing before Judge DuBose on May 4 and 5, offered what he described as a sincere apology. He stated that he had not known until May 1 — four days after filing his response, three days after DuBose ordered Gomez's release, and one day after DHS attacked her publicly — that the murder warrant had already been disclosed in the April 16 ICE press release. He told the judge he had relied on ICE's representation that "a legitimate law enforcement reason prevented disclosure."
He also acknowledged the obvious: had he disclosed the warrant, DuBose almost certainly would not have ordered Gomez's release.
The apology did not satisfy the judge. "It's the candor and the lack of candor to this court that has to be addressed, and it has to be fully investigated so we don't have anything like this happen again," DuBose said from the bench. She found the conduct "egregious enough" to warrant formal disciplinary proceedings. She also demanded that Bolan work to have the DHS press release taken down — a press release that, as of this writing, remains on the department's official website.
"As this particular post is out there, it's setting a false narrative," DuBose said during the hearing. "It puts people at risk. It's a threat to judicial security. But, more importantly, there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is that we're doing every day and it's not helpful. And again, I would argue that it's actually dangerous."
The Special Counsel
Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. of the District of Rhode Island appointed Niki Kuckes, a professor at Roger Williams University School of Law and a former DOJ official herself, as special counsel to conduct an independent investigation into the matter and produce a written report. The appointment is unusual — courts rarely find it necessary to bring in outside counsel to investigate their own bar members — and legal experts say it reflects a deliberate structural choice designed to insulate the process from the kind of interference that has frustrated federal judges in other districts who have attempted to hold the Trump administration accountable.
"It's really all about accountability," said former federal Judge William Smith, who presided over cases in Rhode Island until January 2026. "The judges are going to try their darndest to hold everyone involved in these cases accountable. And the first line of accountability is the lawyers." Smith, a George W. Bush appointee, called the special counsel appointment unusual but unambiguously within the court's authority.
The Government's Response: Attack the Judge
Rather than acknowledge the misconduct, the executive branch escalated. James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, published an op-ed arguing that DuBose herself was engaged in "judicial misconduct" by pursuing accountability against Bolan. Percival's argument was procedural: in his view, Gomez's habeas challenge should have been handled by an immigration judge rather than a federal district court, and therefore ICE bore no obligation to provide the murder warrant information to DuBose's court at all.
The argument sidesteps the central fact: Bolan appeared before the court, filed papers on behalf of the government, and omitted material information. The obligation of candor to the tribunal is not contingent on a party's view of whether the court has jurisdiction. It applies whenever a lawyer appears and makes representations. That is what Rule 3.3 means, and it is what courts in this country have always understood it to mean.
As of this writing, Gomez has not been located. ICE informed Judge DuBose that it had not yet re-detained him after she indicated that he could be taken back into custody. No update has been provided to the court since.
A Pattern That Cannot Be Dismissed as Isolated
Benjamin Grimes, a former senior ethics official at the Justice Department who now teaches at Columbia Law School, put the Rhode Island situation in its proper context. "When something like this has happened in the past, it's been an outlier. It's not been emblematic of a series of data points that can be easily connected," Grimes told CNN. "That's what's different."
He is right that it is different. Federal judges in Chicago, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and now Providence have each encountered versions of the same problem: a Justice Department that withholds information, stonewalls compliance with court orders, and then treats the resulting legal confrontations as political attacks on the administration rather than legitimate exercises of judicial oversight. The appeals process, political pressure, and public attacks on individual judges have been deployed repeatedly to neutralize the consequences of that conduct.
What the Rhode Island court has done — appoint a special counsel answerable to the judiciary rather than the executive branch — represents an attempt to break that cycle. Whether it succeeds will depend, in part, on whether the special counsel's investigation produces findings the court can act upon, and whether the profession's disciplinary machinery is prepared to function when the subject of the misconduct wears a federal badge.
What the Rules Require
Rule 3.3 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct — adopted in some form in every U.S. jurisdiction — is unambiguous: "A lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of material fact or law to a tribunal" and shall not "fail to disclose to the tribunal legal authority in the controlling jurisdiction known to the lawyer to be directly adverse to the position of the client." The obligation extends to material facts as well. A lawyer who knows that their client possesses information material to the proceeding and withholds it from the court does not escape Rule 3.3 by pointing to the client's instruction not to disclose.
Bolan's stated defense — that he was told by ICE officials not to share the information — is not a defense under professional conduct rules. It is, at best, a mitigating factor relevant to the degree of culpability. Lawyers are officers of the court before they are instruments of their clients. That hierarchy is not a formality. It is the structural premise that makes the adversarial system function. When a government lawyer accepts an agency's instruction to conceal material facts from a federal judge, and complies with that instruction in a court filing, the rules violated are the same rules that apply to every other lawyer in the country. The government's badge does not create an exemption.
Kevin Bolan is now the subject of a special counsel investigation. The DHS press release attacking Judge DuBose remains online. Bryan Gomez remains unaccounted for. And the federal bench in Rhode Island — and across the country — is left to consider what it means when the lawyers who appear before them cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
The Ethics Reporter will continue to follow this case.
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