Karma can be a trifle slow sometimes but other times she works with lightning speed. The latter was the case when Pam Bondi was fired Wednesday night and headed back down to Florida. Evidently, jubiliant employees at the Department of Justice began taking Bondi’s portraits down and putting them in the circular file. If this sounds mean, listen to a story of Bondi’s own pettiness over portraits and all will make sense.
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.
Turnabout is fairplay and all’s fair in love and war. Politics is war. Bondi apparently thought her abrasive and dictatorial ways wouldn’t come back to haunt her, that Trump would somehow protect her. Wrong.
Let me make sure I’ve got this. SCIFs usually sit empty. And being allowed in one takes more than a nod or mere invite. As for Bondi, SHE had to put in some effort herself to gain access! It’s an astonishing mix of contempt and idiocy that she’d think it was a good idea to let some custodian in there without arranging for escort ever second of their time on that floor and being searched both before and after.
I’m sure if there’d been a reason for use of that SCIF before he little visit someone would have taken the pictures down. Mostly likely a fair amount of time had lapsed between the last time it was used (and a crew cleaned up after the conference) and the inauguration. Running around and making sure every single portrait of the former folks were taken down is the least of concerns amidst all the far more important things to tend to during a Presidential transition.
Of course, I’m one of those who think it’s flat out stupid and a huge waste of money to have those portraits plastered all over the place in federal buildings in the first place. Prez and VP and the agency head having a display of their portraits in the lobby should be enough. In fact as far as I’m concerned it’s more than enough. If a federal employee doesn’t know who those people are and could recognize them in person if they walked in they are too fucking stupid to be paid via our tax dollars!