Thousands of D.C. Lawyers Unite to Unleash Hellacious Windmill Dunk on Pam Bondi’s Brother’s Head
When your sister is Trump’s attorney general, persuading your peers to elect you to a bar association leadership position is a tough sell.
Each spring, the D.C. Bar Association holds elections for leadership positions, allowing the most ambitious lawyers in a city full of ambitious lawyers to vie for the right to add another line to their résumés. Among this year’s candidates for president was a guy named Brad Bondi, who co-chairs his BigLaw firm’s white-collar defense practice.
Among Bondi’s strengths as a candidate were his extensive high-stakes litigation experience, his distinguished record of government service, and his adjunct teaching gigs at several well-regarded law schools, and also the law school at George Mason. Bondi’s commitment to civic service runs so deep that in 2021, he donated $100,000 to permanently endow a diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarship in his name at his alma mater, the University of Florida Levin College of Law. Among Bondi’s weaknesses as a candidate for, again, a leadership position at a professional association of lawyers is the fact that his sister, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has spent several months defending President Donald Trump’s wildly unconstitutional attacks on many of the firms that employ the people whose support Brad Bondi had to earn.
D.C. bar members responded by going full Georgia Tech-Cumberland on his ass: Bondi lost to his opponent, employment lawyer Diane Seltzer, by 31,000 votes out of nearly 40,000 votes cast, for a turnout rate of 43 percent. Among the many reasons this is funny: In the previous three D.C. bar association presidential elections, turnout hovered between 6 percent and 9 percent, and the total number of ballots cast topped out at around 7,000 votes.
During the race, the results of which make the Reagan-versus-Mondale blowout of 1984 look like a photo finish, Bondi insisted that politics played no role in his decision to seek office. He repeatedly and stridently objected to the notion that, as the bar association’s president, he would be able to abet his sister’s efforts to punish lawyers for taking positions the administration does not like. Instead, Bondi said, he would work to boost free continuing legal education offerings, provide members with more pro bono opportunities, and “vigilantly protect against any push to politicize” the D.C. Bar. Given that a member of his immediate family is in the process of transforming the Justice Department into Donald Trump’s personal revenge factory, I think we can all agree that keeping “politics” out of the legal profession is more important than ever.
Whether Brad Bondi losing this election by a margin rarely seen outside of early-career John Elway Super Bowls is “fair,” strictly speaking, is sort of beside the point, because voters clearly did not give a shit. As it turns out, when your options are casting a ballot for (1) the sibling of a high-profile official within a cartoonishly corrupt White House that is waging a demented anti-First Amendment campaign against your profession’s very existence, or (2) literally anyone else, the choice is not especially difficult.
After his defeat became official, Bondi took to LinkedIn to thank his supporters and castigate his opponents as “rabid partisans” who “lurched this election into the political gutter” by turning a “professional campaign into baseless attacks, identity politics, and partisan recriminations.” Comments on the post are limited to connections only. As I write this sentence, it has received 144 thumbs-up reactions and 104 cry-laughing emojis.
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