SALEM — A former state lawmaker has asked the Oregon State Bar to investigate whether Gov. Kate Brown’s top lawyer, Misha Isaak, violated professional rules for lawyers during a dispute over the independence of the state’s public records advocate.

In a bar complaint filed Wednesday morning, Jeff Kropf asked the Oregon State Bar to investigate whether Isaak committed misconduct by allegedly pressuring Public Records Advocate Ginger McCall to stop pushing for certain public records reforms and instead secretly advance the governor’s policy interests.

McCall cited that pressure, which she described as an “abuse of authority” by Isaak, in a letter to the governor Monday announcing she would resign effective Oct. 12.

Isaak is set to take a seat on the Oregon Court of Appeals on Nov. 1, a job to which the governor appointed him at the end of August.

Kropf, a former Republican representative who is also the executive director of the politically conservative nonprofit Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation, wrote in an email to the state bar that a rule against attorney misconduct “applies to this situation in which Isaak allegedly pressured another lawyer to mislead the public into believing that she is an independent officer while advocating secretly for his client, the governor.”

Under the bar’s rules of professional conduct, it is considered professional misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation that reflects adversely on the lawyer’s fitness to practice law.”

Kropf cited a bar rule that lawyers must not “in the course of representing a client, knowingly intimidate or harass a person because of that person’s race, color, national origin, religion, age, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, or disability.”

“Ms. McCall claimed she was intimidated into misleading the public by Isaak while nine months pregnant which could be a violation of (this rule),” Kropf wrote.

In an interview on the OPB program Think Out Loud on Tuesday, McCall said that she was nine months pregnant when Isaak informed her during a January meeting that he believed he was her supervisor. According to notes McCall wrote immediately after that meeting and which The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained through a public records request, Isaak concluded the meeting by telling McCall he was concerned she would tell a specific reporter about the discussion.

“This conveyed to me that I was expected to keep this meeting, including the fact that the governor’s office interpreted (state law) to mean that I report to them, a secret,” McCall wrote in her contemporaneous memorandum.

McCall told Think Out Loud host Dave Miller on Tuesday that she felt she had to comply with Isaak’s wishes. “I was at the time, nine months pregnant, I will note, and I had moved across the country for this job and I didn’t have any other job in hand and I had bills to pay. So I was put in an impossible position,” she said.