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OAN Commentary by: Theodore R. Malloch
Monday, April 28, 2025
Hold onto your gavels—the D.C. Bar’s 2025 election for President-Elect has turned into a political cage match, and the progressive left is swinging the dirtiest punches.
With voting underway, this race should be about who can best serve the Bar’s 118,000 members, a diverse group of attorneys from Washington’s high-rise firms to America’s distant rural practices.
Instead, supporters of candidate Dianne Seltzer have unleashed a vicious assault on Brad Bondi, a 26-year D.C. legal veteran, branding him a MAGA puppet because his sister, Pam Bondi, is Trump’s Attorney General.
Their campaign of distortions, family smears, and fearmongering reveals the left’s basest instincts, a calculated bid to transform the unbiased Bar into a partisan megaphone. Brad, meanwhile, stands as a bulwark for the Bar’s true values: impartiality, service, and unity. This isn’t just an attack on a decidedly good man—it’s a threat to the Bar’s very purpose, and it demands a resolute defense.
Brad Bondi is the leader the Bar deserves.
He’s a Paul Hastings partner and global co-chair of its Investigations and White-Collar Defense group, with a long career of distinction. Law360 has honored him as MVP three times, and the National Law Journal named him a 2020 Trailblazer. For decades, he’s taught securities law at elite institutions like Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, and George Mason, and he authored a seminal treatise on insider trading.
Fortune 500 companies turn to him as their top pick for SEC challenges, according to the National Association of Corporate Directors. His vision for the Bar is grounded in practicality: free, on-demand CLEs for lawyers with multiple licenses, instant no-cost certificates of good standing, an improved ethics hotline, and a bolstered pro bono program.
He’s led the Bar’s Corporation, Finance, and Securities Law Community, contributed over 100,000 pro bono hours, and donated millions to causes like the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. Brad’s a mentor, a unifier, and a man of principle who’s fostered a Black inner-city child and adopted a Roma son from Russia.
Yet Seltzer’s supporters are blind to Brad’s merits. They’ve concocted a vicious narrative that his candidacy is a Trump-orchestrated scheme to seize control of the Bar. They paint his talented sister Pam as a constitutional villain at the DOJ, claiming Brad will weaponize the Bar to target lawyers disloyal to the administration or mute its advocacy for the rule of law.
These assertions are pure fiction. The Bar has no direct role in attorney discipline—that’s the D.C. Court of Appeals’ domain, as the Bar’s CEO has confirmed. Brad’s campaign launched last spring, well before his sister’s nomination, and he’s had no contact with administration officials about his run. His career—prosecuting cases, advising on SEC matters, and serving on impartial boards like the Atlantic Council—reflects a steadfast dedication to the rule of law, not its subversion.
So why are Seltzer’s backers resorting to such deplorable tactics?
Follow the breadcrumbs: the progressive left is gripped by an insatiable need to turn every institution into a battleground for their ideological wars. Unable to defeat Trump at the ballot box or in the court of public opinion, they’ve seized on the D.C. Bar as a new front in their anti-Trump jihad.
Their strategy is twofold. First, they exploit Brad’s family ties, a low blow that flouts the legal profession’s commitment to judging individuals by their own actions. We don’t choose our siblings—Brad’s sister’s role at the DOJ has no bearing on his candidacy, yet they use it to stoke fear. Second, they peddle alarmist fantasies, alleging Brad and another candidate for treasurer form a coordinated MAGA takeover. There’s no evidence of collusion, and the Bar’s 23-member Board of Governors ensures no single voice can dominate. These claims aren’t about truth—they’re about power, a left-wing gambit to hijack the Bar and make it a mouthpiece for their crazy political grievances.
The tactics themselves are a masterclass in progressive overreach. They’ve smeared Brad with identity politics, the very kind he’s opposed his whole life—like when he taught his foster son, a Black child from D.C.’s inner city projects, to value character over skin color after a humiliating incident at a grocery store.
They’ve pushed unfounded theories of an “undemocratic” plot, ignoring Brad’s platform of service: better CLEs, more pro bono opportunities, and streamlined resources for the Bar’s members, who are too busy with clients to care about partisan grudges. Progressive voices on cable news have even suggested Brad will undermine the legal system, a laughable charge given his record of upholding it through decades of legal practice and scholarship.
Brad, by contrast, is a guardian of the Bar’s principles.
The Bar’s charter declares it “a nonpartisan, apolitical organization,” a standard Brad has vowed to uphold. He’s running to serve all members with practical support, not to advance any agenda.
He’s a patriot who’s mentored lawyers, endowed diverse scholarships at UF Law, and served on boards like Virginians for the Arts, always putting unity over division. Seltzer’s supporters, with their family attacks and fear-driven distortions, are the ones trying to politicize the Bar, eroding its mission to empower lawyers and enhance justice.
Such methods are a stain on the legal profession, showing young lawyers that smear campaigns trump substance. As voting opens, members must reject this progressive assault and elect Brad Bondi—a leader who’ll keep the Bar a beacon of integrity, not a stage for political vendettas.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
THEODORE ROOSEVELT MALLOCH, scholar-diplomat-strategist, was a professor at Yale and Oxford. He was to be Trump’s ambassador to the EU but was made Persona Non Grata by that body. The only American with that credit. His memoir, Davos Aspen & Yale is a best seller.