Jasper Ward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – US Attorney General Pam Bondi fired a Justice Department official on Friday as he made vulgar gestures to members of the National Guard deployed to Washington, D.C. on his way to work.
“Today, I took action to terminate a Justice Department employee for misbehaving the National Guard service staff in Washington, D.C.,” Bondi posted on X.
She said people who disrespect law enforcement will no longer work in the department.
The fired employee Elizabeth Baxter is a paralegal for the department’s environmental defense division, published by the New York Post, which first reported the dismissal, according to Bondi’s memo.
Reuters was unable to contact Baxter immediately, and the newspaper said he raised the middle finger to members of the National Guard on August 18, and later devalued the troops.
President Donald Trump sent hundreds of National Guard members to the streets of Washington this month to declare a crime emergency and announced the federal government’s temporary takeover of the city’s police department.
In June, Republican Trump ordered the Marines and National Guard to go to Los Angeles and threatened to send troops and federal officials to Chicago against the will of the democratic governors of California and Illinois.
The president portrays the U.S. capital as a city of crime, although the Justice Department data shows that violent crime last year was at a 30-year low in Washington, an autonomous federal district under the jurisdiction of Congress.
The U.S. government has also sent agents from numerous agencies, including the FBI, to patrol the streets of the capital.
The Trump administration negotiated with Democratic mayor Muriel Bowser to put police chief Pamela Smith in charge of the department’s actions after the legal challenge raised by the city’s attorney general.
While some, including Democrats, criticized the move to deploy the National Guard to the capital, Trump and his allies noted that crime in the region has been reduced to show success in the deployment.
Trump posted on the Truth Social on Thursday that “Washington, D.C. will soon become a crime-free zone within 14 days, much faster than scheduled.”
(Reported by Jasper Ward; Editor of William Mallard)
