President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday, and within hours, her presence at the Justice Department was quickly erased. Images soon began circulating showing her official portrait taken down from the walls and placed in a trash bin.
One photo obtained by MS NOW showed the portrait inside a trash bin. According to current and former Justice Department officials, the moment reflected how unpopular Bondi had become among career staff. Many employees reportedly left the department during her tenure rather than follow her orders, while others were forced out.
Past tensions inside the Justice Department
Frustration with Bondi among officials was linked in part to an incident early in her tenure. At the time, she entered a secure area of the Justice Department’s national security division and noticed that portraits of President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Merrick Garland were still hanging.
Bondi later spoke about the moment publicly. “I went up on the seventh floor, which is the national security division. The entire floor is a SCIF, so no one can get in there,” she said on Fox News. “So I was able to get the code, open the door, and I look on the wall and see President Biden, Kamala Harris, and Merrick Garland’s paintings still hanging.”
“I personally took all three photos down,” she added. “I put them in front of someone who said to me, ‘Oh well, maintenance is really slow here. I said, ‘Well it took me about 30 seconds to get them off the wall.’”
Bondi presented the episode as an example of what she saw as political bias among career staff. However, she did not publicly mention that a respected official, Devin DeBacker, who had been serving as acting chief of the national security division, was demoted following the incident.
Why Pam Bondi was fired and how she reacted?
Pam Bondi’s firing had reportedly been building for some time, with tensions growing over several issues. According to a Daily Mail, she even pleaded with Donald Trump not to remove her and asked for more time in the role but he did not change his decision. “She was unhappy and tried to change his mind,” a source said. Trump informed her shortly before his prime-time address on the Iran war and the announcement was later made public.
One major reason for the decision was Trump’s belief that Bondi had tipped off Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell about the FBI’s plan to release documents linked to his alleged ties to a Chinese spy, Christine Fang. “She’s intervening in those matters. The White House wasn’t pleased she was intervening due to her personal friendship with Swalwell,” a source told Daily Mail.
During her time in office, Bondi also removed many career Justice Department staff and focused more on immigration cases. She followed Trump’s push to act against political opponents with prosecutors indicting James Comey, Letitia James and John Bolton and trying to bring charges against six members of Congress, according to The Guardian.
Her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files also added pressure as her contradictory statements led to calls for transparency and reportedly increased Trump’s frustration.
