Brad Bondi, the brother of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, has lost his bid to lead Washington’s attorney bar association after an unusually closely-watched election that drew record turnout from the U.S. capital’s 120,000 lawyers.
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Bondi, a partner and co-chair of the investigations and white-collar defense practice at law firm Paul Hastings, lost the race to serve as bar president to Diane Seltzer, an employment law attorney at The Seltzer Law Firm.
D.C. Bar CEO Robert Spagnoletti announced the results on Monday after a race which the group said drew a record 38,600 ballots, up from 7,500 in the last election. Seltzer secured more than 90 percent of the vote, Spagnoletti said.
Bondi in a statement said “although I did not prevail, I stand with a heart full of gratitude and a mind heavy with concern for the future of the D.C. Bar.” He said he was “disgusted by how rabid partisans lurched this election into the political gutter, turning a professional campaign into baseless attacks, identity politics, and partisan recrimination.”
Seltzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Membership in the association is mandatory for D.C. lawyers. The group’s 23-person board, of which the president is a member, plays a limited role in enforcing ethics rules for attorneys by recommending members to sit on a separate panel that oversees the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel.
Bondi’s candidacy rattled some lawyers due to his ties to the Trump administration. His sister, the attorney general, is a loyalist to President Donald Trump and has echoed some of Trump’s false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump in March directed Pam Bondi to refer lawyers and law firms for disciplinary action if they appeared to violate professional conduct rules. That directive was part of an executive order that accused immigration lawyers of coaching their clients to lie.
Some lawyers in Washington had issued warnings on social media about the bar election, urging members to vote for Seltzer. Brad Bondi said before the results were announced that he had run a non-partisan campaign for an apolitical post.
Seltzer in an interview prior to the results said some lawyers were worried about the administration exerting influence on the bar.
“These are people who care about the rule of law and our bar, and if I am its president, things will be run the way they’re supposed to be run,” she said.
The Office of Disciplinary Counsel, created by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, has authority to investigate attorney misconduct and to recommend suspending or disbarring lawyers. It pursued several cases against attorneys involved in efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat to Democrat Joe Biden during the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
The appeals court can reject recommendations from the bar association’s board, and the bar’s president cannot sway investigatory decisions, according to Spagnoletti.
Voting in the D.C. Bar election began on April 15, after Trump launched a pressure campaign on the U.S. legal industry through executive orders against law firms with ties to his legal or political adversaries.
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