There doesn’t seem to be a lot of love at the Department of Justice for recently ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Shortly after President Donald Trump announced Bondi’s removal from the AG job, images started circulating on social media showing her official DOJ portrait being quickly removed from its previous spot next to photos of the president and Vice President JD Vance, MS NOW reported.
One photo that is going viral shows the portrait of Bondi unceremoniously dumped in a trash can.
Various current and former DOJ officials told the news website that the trashy reaction to Bondi’s departure shows just how unpopular she was with the department’s officials and agents ― many of whom left rather than work under her.
DOJ employees’ trashing of the Bondi portrait could be seen as a form of karmic payback for an incident at the beginning of her term, when she personally removed photos of former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former Attorney General Merrick Garland from office walls.
“I personally took all three photos down,” she told Fox News. “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.’”
MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian, who co-wrote the article with Carol Leonnig, appeared on the network Friday and said the trashed pic signals how many DOJ employees feel about Bondi.
“Look, there’s a lot of anger, especially among the career workforce, about Pam Bondi and what she did to change the Justice Department, more so than any attorney general in modern history,” Dilanian said.
He said DOJ employees’ main issue with Bondi is that she incorrectly assumed that the career workforce at DOJ is more sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans.
“The reality is those people worked in the first Trump administration loyally and ably and without incident. But Pam Bondi fired a lot of them and forced many others out. And in that case, she forced out and demoted [Devin DeBacker]. He had been the acting chief of the national security division.”
He added: “So there’s a lot of anger about episodes like that amid all of the other things that Pam Bondi has done with the Justice Department.”
