The crushing loss suffered by Attorney General Bondi’s brother, Bradley, in his bid to lead the Bar Association of the District of Columbia could amount to a proxy vote against his powerful sister.

Mr. Bondi, a partner at Paul Hastings with a specialty in investigations and white-collar defense, is a respected attorney in his own right. He lost the race to another lawyer, Diane Selzer, who practices employment law at her own firm. A record 38,600 attorneys cast their votes, up some 7,500 from the last election. The D.C. Bar is among the largest in the country, with some 119,000 members.

The margin of Ms. Selzer’s victory, though, was startling. Mr. Bondi garnered just 3,490 votes, or 9 percent of the total. Ms. Selzer secured 34,982 votes, which came out to more than 90 percent. After the vote was announced Mr. Bondi accused his opponents of “smearing” him “over my family and peddling conspiracies about my intentions.” He called that “not just an assault on my integrity but on the D.C. Bar’s very mission.” 

Mr. Bondi adds that he is “disgusted by how rabid partisans lurched this election into the political gutter, turning a professional campaign into baseless attacks, identity politics and partisan recrimination. … Never before has a D.C. Bar election been leveraged along partisan lines in this way.”

Also losing, in a bid to become the Bar’s treasurer, was Alicia Long, who has served as an assistant to the last two acting United States attorneys for the District of Columbia — Ed Martin and Jeanine Pirro. Ms. Selzer’s supporters included a founder of the Lincoln Project, George Conway, who though not a member of the D.C. Bar stumped for Ms. Selzer.

Ms. Selzer, after her win, told NBC News that “we’ve got to make sure that we hang on to the rule of law and that we can practice law safely. … That we can represent who we want without worrying about retaliation.”

Ms. Selzer’s invocation of “retaliation” appears to allude to President Trump’s campaign, via a flurry of executive orders, against law firms that he perceives as hostile to him and his administration. Federal judges have determined those to be unconstitutional, though some firms have reached agreements with Mr. Trump outside of court.  Judge Beryl Howell reckoned that the orders drew “from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’”

The lopsided vote can also be seen as a rebuke of Ms. Bondi. Last month she downgraded the role of the American Bar Association in the vetting of federal judges. Ms. Bondi wrote in a letter to the association, “Unfortunately, the ABA no longer functions as a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications, and its ratings invariably and demonstrably favor nominees put forth by Democratic administrations.” She added on X that the ABA “has lost its way.”

The District of Columbia Bar has been no stranger to contentious proceedings. Last year it permanently revoked Mayor Giuliani’s law license in the nation’s capital for his work on behalf of Mr. Trump in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. A spokesman for Mr. Giuliani called that move “an absolute travesty and a total miscarriage of justice.” Mr. Giuliani also had his law license revoked in New York. 

A committee of the D.C. Bar has also recommended that another lawyer who provided counsel to Mr. Trump, Jeffrey Clark, have his license suspended for two years. Mr. Clark, like Mr. Giuliani, has been criminally charged as part of a sprawling racketeering case brought by the district attorney of Georgia’s Fulton County, Fani Willis. That case is now frozen pending Ms. Willis’s appeal of her disqualification to the Georgia court of appeals. 

Ms. Bondi, who is licensed to practice law in Florida and previously served as the state’s attorney general, has had her own struggles with the Sunshine State’s bar association. Last week a third formal complaint against her was filed. It alleged that she has committed “serious professional misconduct” and that her work as attorney general “threatens the rule of law and the administration of justice.” The Florida Bar, though, decided for the third time that Ms. Bondi’s federal office immunizes her from such complaints.