Pam Bondi’s portrait already taken down at Justice Department

It didn’t take long for the pictures to come off the wall.

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Within hours of the news that President Trump had fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, images began to circulate of her official framed portrait, unceremoniously removed from its place of honor near the President and Vice President on the walls of Justice Department offices.

One photo obtained by MS NOW showed Bondi’s portrait in a trash bin.

Current and former Justice Department officials say it’s a reflection of how deeply unpopular Bondi was with career officials and agents, thousands of whom left the department rather than follow her orders. Dozens more were forced out.

Many of those officials remain angry about an episode at the beginning of her term, when Bondi entered a secure area of the Justice Department offices of the national security division, and saw that President Biden’s portrait was still on the wall, along with attorney general Merrick Garland. Bondi had demoted a respected career veteran over the pictures still hanging in the offices after Trump’s inauguration. 

In interviews, Bondi recounted how she took the photos down herself. She cited the episode as evidence that career Justice Department employees were more loyal to Democrats than Republicans.

“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,” Bondi 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.’”