Most years, the annual elections for the District of Columbia Bar Association’s officers and board are so routine that more than 90% of the lawyers eligible to vote decline.
This is no typical year, however. The 2025 race has turned into a surprisingly heated and headline-grabbing affair, stirred by the entry of two candidates with deep ties to the Trump administration. One of the candidates for D.C. Bar president, Bradley Bondi, is the brother of the attorney general. The other, Alicia Long, is deputy to one of the administration’s most controversial lawyers. She is running for bar treasurer.
As of mid-May, the contest had drawn votes from 30,000 of the D.C. Bar’s 88,000 eligible voting members, or more votes than had been cast in the last three annual elections combined. For their part, the two candidates have stressed their longstanding ties to the bar, and their campaigns have focused largely on bread-and-butter bar issues, like expanding continuing legal education and pro bono opportunities.
But opponents see the race as a stealth attempt by Trump-aligned lawyers to take over one of the largest and most influential mandatory bar associations in the nation at a time when the administration is pressuring lawyers to stop opposing its policies. Or as one Slate headline put it, “MAGA is Aiming to Take Over the D.C. Bar. Be Afraid.”
Candidates on the Defense
The D.C. Bar oversees licensing and discipline for many of the lawyers working at federal government agencies and boasts a membership roster that includes five of the current members of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Neither the president nor the treasurer have a direct role in disciplining bar members, but as The Washington Post recently noted, their role in helping set the agenda for the association at a moment when the Trump administration and its appointees “have upset standards of judicial independence” has “roiled the [bar] and put candidates on the defense.”
Bondi, who launched his campaign prior to his sister Pam’s nomination as attorney general, has pledged to ensure the D.C. Bar stays nonpartisan, saying in a profile on the association’s website that the bar “is not, and must not become, a political organization. I will fight vigorously against any attempts externally or internally to change that.”
Co-chair of the Investigations and White Collar Defense practice at Paul Hastings, Bondi has won plaudits for his white collar and securities litigation work. As one recruiter told The American Lawyer last year, “Brad walks into a room, and he has credibility.” The conservative National Review, in defense of his D.C. Bar candidacy, urged lawyers not to “blame Brad Bondi for his sister.”
Yet, Bondi’s bona fides and his desire to keep the bar from taking political stances are among the reasons some opponents remain skeptical. Bondi has “proposed to expand free online continuing legal education programs, and to stop charging members for certificates of good standing,” Slate wrote. “These are perfectly fine goals, but would they really inspire a man like Brad Bondi to run for office?”
Diane Seltzer, an employment lawyer who is Bondi’s opponent for D.C. Bar president, has framed the race as a fight to defend the rule of law in the Trump era, and said she sees an active role for the bar in this battle. “Lawyers—especially those in Washington, D.C.—are serving as the strong set of guardrails protecting the Constitution, ensuring access to justice, and challenging unlawful conduct by the highest levels of government,” Seltzer said on her firm’s website. “The bar has to be a source of strength.”
Bar Association Scrutiny
The candidacies come at a fraught moment for the legal profession. Since February, President Donald Trump has targeted several law firms that have represented clients or advocated for issues at odds with the administration.
In a series of executive orders, Trump blacklisted the firms, cutting off security clearances and access to federal agencies, and launched a regulatory probe into diversity-based hiring at those firms. Nine large firms acquiesced to Trump, offering, among other things, nearly $1 billion in pro bono support to fund pro-administration legal causes.
At the same time, the administration took aim at the American Bar Association. On Feb. 14, for example, the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, banned the FTC’s political appointees from holding leadership positions in the ABA, participating in or attending the organization’s events, or renewing any existing memberships.
Two weeks later, Attorney General Bondi wrote to the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar accusing it of considering policies that would “encourage unlawful discrimination by the very law schools the Council is tasked with accrediting.” Bondi threatened the Council’s accreditation powers, calling its status as “the sole accrediting body of American law schools” a privilege, and arguing that “mandatory diversity objectives are an abuse of that privilege, which is subject to revocation.”
Bondi’s letter also sent an unsubtle message to state bar associations, suggesting they could face trouble if they did not fall in line. “It is unclear how state bars can lawfully continue to require prospective lawyers to attend ABA-accredited law schools if the Council continues to abuse its privilege in this way. The Department of Justice stands ready to take every action necessary to prevent further abuse,” Bondi wrote.
Trump followed up with an April 23 executive order directing the Department of Education to determine whether the federal government should end the ABA’s status as the government’s official law school accreditor.
Weaponization Claims
D.C. Bar officials have also taken heat from key Trump administration lawyers, including Long’s boss, Ed Martin, a Trump loyalist who recently exited as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia after his nomination for the permanent job ran aground in the U.S. Senate.
On the day he left the U.S. attorney’s office, Martin revealed in a letter to staff that he is the subject of an ethics probe by the D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates complaints and allegations of attorney misconduct among members of the D.C. Bar.
First reported by Reuters on May 14, the letter castigated the chief prosecutor for D.C. Bar, disciplinary matters, Hamilton “Phil” Fox, claiming he violated confidentiality rules in his handling of the case. "It is an outrage how they treat us and I will continue the fight against the weaponization of our law licenses against us," Martin wrote in the letter quoted by Reuters. "I am taking on Mr. Fox head on. His conduct is personally insulting and professionally unacceptable."
Martin—who is now back at the DOJ—has asked the District of Columbia Court of Appeals to investigate and suspend Fox and to dismiss the complaint filed against him, Reuters reported.
For her part, Long, who is a current member of the D.C. Bar board, has said nothing of Martin’s complaints in the treasurer race. Like Bondi, Long has focused her campaign on issues like expanding CLEs, training and networking events, and asserting that “the core purpose of the D.C. Bar is to enhance access to justice, improve the legal system, and empower lawyers to achieve excellence.”
The Limits of Power
If Seltzer and others are right, and Trump supporters are looking to dominate the D.C. Bar, they will have their work cut out for them. Along with the president and treasurer, Bar members are voting for five seats on the 20-member Board of Governors. No Trump-aligned candidates appear to be in the running for those roles.
While Bondi and Long would undoubtedly have influence should they win leadership positions, key decisions must still be ratified by the full board. What’s more, bar officials are effectively muzzled in speaking for the bar without the board’s approval. According to D.C. Bar bylaws, “no opinion of the bar on any matter involving legislation of major public interest or concern or of major importance to the members of the bar shall be publicly expressed unless authorized by the Board of Governors.”
Among the 13 candidates running for bar board positions, four are current members seeking reelection. And the other nine represent the kind of roster one might expect in D.C.—lawyers from Big Law, government, advocacy groups, small local firms and nonprofit organizations.
What one won’t find in the mix are Trump devotees. None of the 13 contributed to the Republicans in the 2024 election cycle, nor do they appear to have significant ties to the Trump administration. On the other hand, 11 candidates have contributed to Democratic candidates over the years, mostly small amounts in races for local D.C. offices.
The pattern is similar among the remaining board members whose seats are not up for election this year. While Long and a few other board members have contributed no money to candidates, federal campaign records show that most have made modest contributions to Democratic candidates in recent election cycles. That includes Seltzer, who has contributed a total of $120 to Act Blue, the Democratic fundraising site, since 2020.
Meanwhile, Bondi has been a far more active political player. According to Federal Election Commission records, Bondi has contributed more than $75,000 to GOP candidates over the last decade. Trump alone received $20,000 from Bondi in the last few days of the 2024 campaign cycle.
Uncertain Impact
The voting period for the D.C. Bar presidency opened in April and is set to conclude on June 4. While the race’s political dynamics have triggered unprecedented media attention from outlets like the Washington Post and NBC News, it’s unclear how much impact the election will have on the bar’s actual operations—other than spurring members to vote.
In an interview with Axios, Robert Spagnoletti—a former bar president and current D.C. Bar CEO—emphasized that disciplinary complaints are “utterly and completely independent” from the bar’s officers and board. Anyone with the goal to “somehow ‘gain leadership of the bar’ to affect this place” is bound to fail, Spagnoletti said. “It’s not going to happen. It’s impossible.”
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David L. Brown is a legal affairs writer and consultant who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times, and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy and creates in-depth content for legal industry clients and works closely with Best Law Firms as senior content consultant.
