The speed at which the Department of Justice employees literally threw away Pam Bondi tells you everything you need to know about how despised she was by career officials. According to reporting from Ken Dilanian and Carol Leonnig obtained by MS NOW, “Within hours of the news that President Donald Trump had fired Pam Bondi as attorney general, images began circulating of her framed portrait, unceremoniously removed from its place of honor near the president and vice president on the walls of Justice Department offices.” One photo showed Bondi’s portrait directly in a trash bin. The swift disposal isn’t coincidental. Current and former DOJ officials confirmed it reflects how deeply unpopular Bondi had become — so much so that thousands of career employees left the department rather than follow her orders, with dozens more forced out. The animosity stems from an incident early in her tenure that crystallized her contempt for DOJ’s professional workforce. Bondi entered a secure area of the national security division and discovered that portraits of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Attorney General Merrick Garland were still hanging on the walls after Trump’s inauguration. She demoted a respected career veteran over the pictures. Bondi later recounted the episode on Fox News, painting it as evidence of Democratic disloyalty among DOJ employees. “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. 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 boasted. “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.’” The irony is searing: nearly all of the senior career officials Bondi suspected of disloyalty had served loyally and ably throughout Trump’s first term without incident. They viewed her power play over portraits as petty vindictiveness masquerading as loyalty testing. Now that Bondi has been shown the door, many DOJ veterans are quietly celebrating — and literally throwing away the evidence of her tenure.
Portraits of Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly tossed into trash bins at Justice Department after Donald Trump fired her. – MS NOW [image or embed] — AZ Intel (@azintel.bsky.social) April 3, 2026 at 9:36 AM
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