Pam Bondi's Portrait Seen in Trash Bin at Justice Department 1 Day After Trump Announced Her Firing

Former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s official portraits are coming off the walls of the Justice Department, one day after President Donald Trump announced that Bondi had been dismissed from her duties in the second Cabinet shakeup of his term.

One of Bondi’s framed portraits in the Justice Department’s offices was photographed in a trash bin, MS NOW reported on Friday, April 3.

Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who served as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer for just over a year, was reportedly informed of her ouster prior to Trump’s live address from the White House on Wednesday, April 1, and was already on her way back to Florida by the time the evening broadcast began, according to Fox News.

Bondi had accompanied the president to the Supreme Court only hours before, for a hearing in a case against Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship.

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Her unceremonious departure from the Justice Department followed months of controversy and public backlash over the administration’s handling of a trove of documents related to the activities of the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump had expressed a willingness to declassify while campaigning for the presidency in 2024.

In an instance for which Bondi was widely criticized, the former attorney general told Fox News during a televised interview last February that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now.” Less than six months later, in July 2025, the Justice Department said no such list existed.

Bondi also drew criticism for her purge of career Justice Department employees who worked on former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left office.

Shortly after Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, Bondi had boasted that she removed portraits of individuals from the previous administration at the Justice Department herself. She allegedly demoted the acting chief of the national security division, Devin DeBacker, after she saw that a portrait of President Joe Biden was still hanging, Bloomberg Law reported.

“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 during an interview that February on Fox News’ My View with Lara Trump. “So, I was able to get the code, open the door, and I look on the wall and see President Biden, [former Vice President] Kamala Harris, and [former Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s paintings still hanging.”

“I personally took all three photos down,” Bondi told host Lara Trump, who is married to the president’s son, Eric Trump. “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.’ ”

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Bondi, whose departure from the Justice Department was announced on Thursday, April 2, is the second Cabinet-level official to leave the second Trump administration.

The president dismissed former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in early March, after a pair of contentious congressional oversight hearings and months of backlash over the department’s aggressive immigration enforcement operations, including the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota.

In a social media post on Thursday, Trump said Bondi would transition to a new position in the private sector. Bondi wrote in a post on X that she is "thrilled about" her new role, which has not yet been disclosed.