WASHINGTON — Two of President Donald Trump’s allies have launched bids for leadership roles with the D.C. Bar Association, an under-the-radar effort that would give them more control over the influential legal group.
The push comes amid bar associations’ confrontations with the Trump administration, and some federal attorneys have looked to their state groups for ethical guidance amid Trump’s rapid reshaping of government.
Bradley Bondi — a lawyer who is Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother — and Alicia Long — a deputy to Ed Martin, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — are running for president and treasurer. The election runs from April to June, according to the organization’s website.
While the general public may not pay much attention to bar associations, lawyers do. The nongovernmental groups decide who gets to be a lawyer — and who gets to stay a lawyer when misconduct allegations are involved. The D.C. Bar, as it is known, has more than 120,000 members, and, by virtue of its location, it is where a significant number of federal attorneys are licensed.
The effort to take control of the D.C. Bar follows warnings Trump administration officials have directed at bar associations, which lawyers inside and outside the government have suggested could play a role in slowing down legally questionable elements of Trump’s agenda.
On one of her first days as attorney general, Pam Bondi warned career lawyers that they could be fired for refusing to carry out orders because of any personal objections. Meanwhile, the D.C. Bar maintains a confidential legal ethics hotline for members to submit concerns.
Bondi and Long each face one opponent. If elected, they would join the professional organization’s 23-person Board of Governors. Though the D.C. Bar does not have a direct role in disciplining lawyers for misconduct, its board does recommend members to sit on the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, the disciplinary arm of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Disciplinary cases are brought forward by a separate Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates and prosecutes ethical complaints against lawyers.
With Republicans in control of the House and the Senate, bar discipline could be one of the last remaining ways to hold Trump-appointed attorneys accountable. On Thursday, a group of Democratic senators wrote a letter to the Office of Disciplinary Counsel expressing “grave concerns” about some of the highly unusual steps Martin has taken since he became interim U.S. attorney. The letter accused him of “serious violations of professional conduct” and abusing his position. Martin did not respond to requests for comment.
Some Trump attorneys have faced sanctions in Washington for their actions. Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in Washington last year in the wake of his efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss; a committee of the Board on Professional Responsibility found that what it called his “utter disregard for facts denigrates the legal profession.”
Jeffrey Clark — a former Justice Department lawyer whom Trump tried to make attorney general in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack — appeared before the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility last year and invoked the Fifth Amendment. A panel made a preliminary determination that he had committed an ethical violation and recommended in August that he be suspended from practicing law for two years. With Trump back in the White House, Clark is now acting administrator of the White House Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
And a Republican report issued in December by Rep. Barry Loudermilk, of Georgia, alleged possible coordination between House Jan. 6 investigators and the D.C. Bar to target an attorney who represented a former Trump White House aide. (The Office of Disciplinary Counsel dismissed that complaint last year.)
Bondi’s and Long’s bids quickly caused some alarm among attorneys in Washington. An email seen by NBC News and sent to dozens of Washington-area lawyers — and also shared on social media — described the duo as “Trump/Pam Bondi loyalists” who were “making a bid to take over the DC Bar” and encouraged recipients to pay attention and vote.
An attorney at a federal agency said the pro-Trump effort to win leadership positions at the D.C. Bar suggests the administration “may be getting pushback internally” from lawyers who are concerned about potential professional consequences for carrying out Trump’s agenda.
“They know this is a potential weakness,” this person added.
Bondi and Long did not respond to requests for comment. The D.C. Bar did not reply to a request for comment.
Bondi’s opponent, Diane A. Seltzer, an attorney with a focus on employment law who already serves on the D.C. Bar’s Board of Governors, said she decided to run because she saw it as the culmination of decades of bar leadership experience at a critical time in history.
“I want to be able to support the members of our bar in this time of governmental chaos,” she said. “Our legal system needs a bar that understands and sees them and can support them in ways that will be helpful and keep everyone’s energy up and keep people from giving up or burning out.”
The D.C. Bar does not control the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, but anyone can submit a complaint there, which is then heard by the Board of Professional Responsibility. The D.C. Bar seeks candidates for the Board of Professional Responsibility, but the D.C. Court of Appeals ultimately chooses the candidates.
There are fears among some Washington lawyers, however, that with Trump-supporting officials in place, the D.C. Bar might choose to ignore Court of Appeals rulings or orders from the Office of Disciplinary Counsel.
“I would never want to be president of a bar that could do that or that would do that,” Seltzer said. “I wouldn’t want to be president of a bar where those lines could be blurred and we would say, ‘I am not going to follow what the Court of Appeals has decided or what the Office of Disciplinary Counsel has ordered.’”
The disciplinary process can be protracted. Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens — a former assistant U.S. attorney in Washington who led the aggressive prosecution of anti-Trump protesters arrested en masse during Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 — is only now facing a disciplinary hearing eight years later, accused of hiding exculpatory evidence from defendants.
The Trump administration has had a contentious relationship with bar associations, and Republicans have long accused them of having a left-wing bent — tensions that reached a boiling point in Trump’s first term when the American Bar Association, the national bar organization, rated several of his judicial picks as “not qualified” for the jobs they were nominated for.
Project 2025 took aim at the American Bar Association in its policy road map for a future conservative administration, calling for the president to issue an executive order pursuing antitrust measures against it. In one of his first moves as president, Trump signed an executive order that said bar associations could be targeted for investigations over their diversity programs.
Last month, the American Bar Association lambasted what it described as the Trump administration’s “wide-scale affronts to the rule of law itself.” After billionaire Elon Musk, who is overseeing Trump’s effort to reshape government, called for judges who have ruled against Trump to be impeached, the ABA said in a new statement Tuesday that it would “not stay silent in the face of efforts to remake the legal profession into something that rewards those who agree with the government and punishes those who do not.” It added that such attempts at intimidation “cannot be sanctioned or normalized.”
On Wednesday, Chad Mizelle, the Justice Department’s chief of staff, punched back at the ABA, posting to X that “they disguise their advocacy as work to ‘promote the best quality legal education, competence, ethical conduct and professionalism, and pro bono and public service work in the legal profession,’ but they never mention that they also work hand-in-hand on left-wing causes.”
He also wrote that the bar association’s “dedication to left-wing activism undermines justice” and that under the attorney general’s “leadership, DOJ is carrying out President Trump’s executive orders putting an end to radical DEI programs, and we’re all over the ABA’s illegal and immoral diversity mandates for law school accreditation.”
In 2020, the ABA rated Mizelle’s wife, Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, as “not qualified” to serve as a U.S. district court judge in Florida. She was 33 at the time and the youngest person Trump had tapped for the lifetime appointment. She was confirmed to the seat in November 2020.
