Pam Bondi’s framed portrait was taken down from the Justice Department and, within hours of President Donald Trump’s announcement that he had fired her as attorney general, turned up in a trash bin, according to a photograph obtained by MS NOW. The swift removal of the image — once displayed near the portraits of the president and vice president in Justice Department corridors — underscored the abruptness of her departure and the sharp divisions she engendered inside the department.
MS NOW’s photo shows Bondi’s likeness crumpled in a waste receptacle, a visual coda to a tenure that current and former Justice Department officials described as deeply unpopular with career staff. “It did not take long for the pictures to come off the wall,” the outlet reported, and officials who spoke to MS NOW said the reaction reflected long-simmering hostility toward Bondi among thousands of career attorneys and agents. According to those officials, many employees left the department rather than carry out what they viewed as politically driven directives; dozens more were pushed out during her time in office.
Those officials also pointed to a contentious episode early in Bondi’s stint at the Justice Department that remains a point of grievance. The incoming report says Bondi entered the secure offices of the national security division — a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) — and found portraits of President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and then-Attorney General Merrick Garland still hanging on the walls. Officials told MS NOW that Bondi demoted a respected career veteran over the continued display of those pictures after the Trump inauguration.
Bondi has publicly described the incident in interviews, saying she personally removed the three portraits and interpreting the episode as evidence of partisan loyalty among career 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,” Bondi told 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. 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 portrait-in-the-trash photograph amplifies a narrative from both inside and outside the department about tumult and turnover during Bondi’s tenure. The abrupt removal occurred as the White House named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to serve as acting attorney general while Bondi transitions out — a move that some allies framed as a routine personnel change and critics said reflected deeper instability at the top of the Justice Department.
Portraits and other symbols matter inside the Justice Department because they mark institutional continuity across administrations, and the episode highlights the persistent tension between political appointees and career staffers who staff the department through changing presidencies. For now, Bondi’s portrait being discarded in a bin is the latest, highly visible sign of the rupture her time at the department produced.