In the past few weeks, Emil Bove III, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department, has summoned senior career officials to his upper-floor office at headquarters to calmly deliver the news they were being transferred, marginalized or otherwise shoved to the exits.
Mr. Bove, a former federal prosecutor who bonded with President Trump while serving on his criminal defense team, expressed sympathy and praised their service but refused to modify his orders, according to people briefed on the conversations.
Inside the department, Mr. Bove has quickly emerged as the Trump administration’s enforcer, demanding compliance and overseeing a series of personnel moves that have thrust him into the spotlight. Among them: the forced transfers of top nonpolitical officials seen as a bulwark against political interference, the firing of Capitol riot prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and, perhaps most significantly, the effort to collect a list of F.B.I. agents assigned to Jan. 6 cases.
At no time has Mr. Bove offered evidence those he targeted had done anything improper, illegal or unethical. Instead he has cited the president’s authority under the Constitution.
Mr. Bove is on good terms with West Wing officials, and he communicates regularly with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, on homeland security issues. But he is not taking their direct orders, so much as acting on Mr. Trump’s general instructions, with the president’s executive orders as his framework, according to people in his orbit, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s inner workings.
James McHenry, who served as interim attorney general before Pam Bondi was sworn in to run the department on Wednesday, initiated the firing of more than a dozen career prosecutors who worked under the special counsel Jack Smith. Their prosecution of Mr. Trump, he added, suggested they could not faithfully enact the president’s agenda.
But Mr. Bove, in close cooperation with the department’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, has been the driving force many of the other moves. The two have overseen the drafting of a series of sternly worded memos, including a threat to prosecute state and city officials who refused to carry out immigration enforcement, followed by Mr. Bove’s visit to the city to observe enforcement actions personally. It led the department to sue officials in Chicago.
Mr. Bove is slated to become his former law partner Todd Blanche’s deputy, if Mr. Blanche is confirmed for the job he now occupies, deputy attorney general. Mr. Bove is expected to remain a power player, though his relationship with the F.B.I. may remain fraught.
Mr. Bove, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.
It remains to be seen if Mr. Bove will exert the same outsize influence with Ms. Bondi in the building.
But she arrives at a moment of crises, created by Mr. Bove’s challenge to the F.B.I.’s independence in pressuring the bureau’s interim leadership to collect the names of thousands of agents who had worked on Jan. 6 cases, a move seen as a possible prelude to a purge. It provoked a swift, negative reaction among the F.B.I.’s conservative rank-and-file, a work force that was particularly receptive to Mr. Trump’s law-and-order message — a group Ms. Bondi will need to fulfill her promise to “Make America Safe Again.”
“Special agents who risk their lives protecting this country” are being targeted “for carrying out the orders they were given by their superiors,” leaders of the F.B.I. Agents Association told Congress in a letter this week.
A few Senate Republicans, alarmed by the situation at the F.B.I., privately told Democratic colleagues they were relieved by the fast pace of Ms. Bondi’s confirmation and were concerned about White House meddling with a lower-level official like Mr. Bove at the helm, according to people familiar with the situation.
The Workhorse
Mr. Bove is, in many ways, the “Law & Order” TV archetype of the hard-charging prosecutor — indefatigable, hypercompetitive, a fair-minded foxhole buddy to his admirers, an abrasive, win-at-all costs careerist to those he clashed with over the years.
He was raised in the Finger Lakes region of New York, a standout student and star lacrosse player, the son of Emil Bove Jr., a respected lawyer in the state attorney general’s office. Mr. Bove attended Georgetown University’s law school, clerked for two federal judges, and worked for a white-shoe law firm before becoming a prosecutor at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan in 2012.
His intense work ethic, notable even in an office of overachievers, led to promotions, culminating with his appointment as co-chief of the office’s terrorism and international narcotics unit in 2019.
Mr. Bove was a player in high-profile cases, including the successful prosecution of Caesar Sayoc, a Florida man charged with sending pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and Trump critics. He also oversaw the indictment of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela on drug-trafficking charges.
He racked up guilty pleas or convictions at trial of a Russian spy, a pipe-bomb terrorist, a Hezbollah operative and an F.B.I. employee accused of spying for China. Former colleagues say they were impressed by his courtroom savvy and creativity: During the successful prosecution of the man who detonated a pressure-cooker bomb in Manhattan, his team hauled the bomb-crumpled dumpster into the courtroom.
“Emil is a zealous, hard-nosed, and extremely talented prosecutor,” said Geoffrey S. Berman, a former U.S. attorney and Mr. Bove’s onetime boss — who was himself fired by Mr. Trump for refusing to investigate political rivals. “He is a person of great integrity.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Bove faced questions about his conduct. In 2020, defense lawyers accused prosecutors working under his supervision of seeking to hide exculpatory evidence in a case against an Iranian banker, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad.
A judge overseeing the case found that while prosecutors had not intentionally withheld evidence, members of Mr. Bove’s team made a deliberate attempt to obscure the truth. Mr. Bove was not accused of wrongdoing. But eventually the disclosure issues caused prosecutors to request the case be dismissed.
In early 2022, Mr. Bove left the office to become a criminal defense lawyer. The next year, he partnered with Todd Blanche, another veteran of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, who was already working as a criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bove played a key role in the Mr. Trump’s federal defense, and some of the bellicose language of his recent memos bears an uncanny similarity to Trump defense team filings.
But it was his dogged performance in the Manhattan case over the falsification of business records that made the strongest impression on the president, despite Mr. Trump’s conviction.
After the election, Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche castigated the judge in the case, Juan M. Merchan, accusing him of engaging in “unlawful,” politically motivated conduct. Justice Merchan, in turn, said Mr. Bove and other Trump lawyers had “the potential to create a chilling effect” on the judiciary.
Law Enforcement Unease
That chill has spread to the F.B.I.
Late last week, Mr. Bove repeatedly asked the F.B.I.’s interim director, Brian Driscoll and Robert C. Kissane, his deputy, to turn over the names of employees who worked on the Jan. 6 investigations. He did not put down his initial requests in writing, which former senior F.B.I. agents say is unusual.
Mr. Driscoll, a veteran F.B.I. agent known for his fearlessness during operations in the United States and in the Middle East as a member of the agency’s elite tactical team, was neither persuaded nor intimidated by Mr. Bove. Neither was Mr. Kissane.
Mr. Bove had previously been on good terms with the two men. He played a role in the interim appointments of Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane, according to a person with knowledge of the process.
But the two acting leaders of the F.B.I. resisted. Mr. Bove kept pushing until Mr. Driscoll agreed to a compromise: He would send a survey asking thousands of employees what work they had performed on Jan. 6 cases, using I.D. numbers rather than names.
Mr. Driscoll made it clear he was doing so reluctantly, counting himself as a Jan. 6 investigator in the mass email, and pointedly questioning what the information would be used for.
The fact that Mr. Bove has not publicly acknowledged any role in enforcement efforts after Jan. 6 while he was a top national security prosecutor in Manhattan has rankled current and former agents.
“Mr. Bove had intimate knowledge of all of the Jan. 6 investigations being worked by the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force and did not voice any objection or concern,” said Christopher O’Leary, who was a top counterterrorism agent in the New York field office at the time.
“Insubordination” is how Mr. Bove described the actions of Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane in an all-hands email sent to all F.B.I. employees on Wednesday.
He accused Mr. Driscoll of distorting his intentions — and claimed the list would be used only to see if “particular” agents had acted improperly during lawfully conducted follow-up investigations.
As in all of his memos, Mr. Bove provided no evidence that anyone had done anything wrong, other than participating in an investigation Mr. Trump subsequently decreed as “weaponization” of the federal bureaucracy.
Mr. Bove won his skirmish, but it incited a rebellion among F.B.I. rank-and-file, along with a quick volley of lawsuits.
He appears to have greatly underestimated the power of institutional cohesion and of Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane, whom associates say are working in lock step to shield the bureau from retaliation. The top agent in the F.B.I. New York field office issued a call to arms, vowing “to dig in” — while agents lionized Mr. Driscoll, in memes and video clips.
Even if Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Kissane temporarily held the line on providing the data, at least nine high-ranking officials have been forced out since Mr. Trump’s inauguration. And Mr. Bove, in his blistering memo, did not signal any intention of dropping his name-gathering mission.
It is not clear if Ms. Bondi’s arrival — or the expected confirmation of Kash Patel as F.B.I. director this month — will change that dynamic.
But there are indications that some people close to Mr. Trump will at least try to exert direct influence on the department.
One worrying sign, in the view of some department officials, was the hiring of Paul Ingrassia, a self-described “constitutional law” expert who pushed a fake theory that Nikki Haley was ineligible to run for president that Mr. Trump promoted on social media during the 2024 Republican primary.
Mr. Ingrassia was given the ambiguous title “White House liaison” and an office not far from the attorney general’s suite, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.
Ms. Bondi, for her part, has repeatedly denied any conflict between her allegiance to Mr. Trump and the law — and said she intended to counter weaponization of the department.
One of the first directives she signed called on career civil servants to “faithfully” follow the Trump agenda and submit to new “review and accountability” procedures.
“No one who has acted with a righteous spirit or just intentions has any cause for concern,” Ms. Bondi wrote.
She did not specify how she intended to determine an employee’s righteousness.
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