Pam Bondi threatened to prosecute private employee at a Office Depot for not printing Charlie Kirk vigil flyers

Attorney General Pam Bondi has threatened to prosecute a former private employee at Office Depot for refusing to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil.

Office Depot fired an employee at its Portage store in Michigan two days ago after a video emerged of the staffer telling a customer, “We don’t print propaganda, it’s propaganda.”

Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Bondi about free speech and the First Amendment on his Monday night show.

“Businesses cannot discriminate,” Bondi said, referring to the Office Depot incident. “If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”

“I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our civil rights unit looking at that immediately, that Office Depot had done that,” Bondi added. “We’re looking it up.”

Private companies have a constitutional right to refuse service to anyone as long as it’s for non-discriminatory reasons. However, people are pointing to recent Supreme Court rulings that appear to contradict that statute.

In 2023, the Supreme Court sided with a Colorado Christian website designer who did not want to create a website for same-sex couples, despite the state’s anti-discrimination laws. The Supreme Court said the First Amendment protected the designer from creating websites she doesn’t believe in.

It followed a similar 2018 landmark case in Colorado over a baker who would not make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

“[Bondi] must have also forgot that the Supreme Court recently ruled that you don’t have to serve gay customers if it conflicts with your religious beliefs,” journalist and documentary maker Jemele Hill commented on Instagram about the Justice Department chief’s comments. “The employee should sue the s*** out of Office Depot and make the same claim.”

“Yet a baker can deny baking a cake if they have right wing ideology,” another person added.

The video of the incident between the Office Depot employee and the customer who wanted to print flyers for a vigil for Kirk gained traction on social media after it was shared by Kelly Sackett, chairwoman of the Kalamazoo County Republican Party.

Matthew DePerno, a lawyer representing the party, previously told The Independent it was “outrageous” that a major chain would prevent someone from printing a simple poster featuring Kirk’s name and date of birth.

DePerno, who personally knew Kirk, said the late activist was a positive force who recruited numerous young people to conservative politics with regular events at college campuses such as the one where the activist was fatally shot in Utah last week.

Office Depot said the employee violated company policy.

“Upon learning of the incident, we immediately reached out to the customer to address their concerns and seek to fulfill their order to their satisfaction,” Office Depot said in a statement on X. “We have also launched an immediate internal review and, as a result, the associate involved is no longer with the organization.”

The Office Depot employee is the latest in a growing list of people who have found themselves in hot water for comments they’ve made on social media about Kirk’s assassination.