“President-elect Donald Trump and Kash Patel, his pick to lead the FBI, during the Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md., on Dec. 14, 2024.” Doug Mills / The New York Times/Redux via NBC
The Trump administration would like you to know that there is a new sheriff in town. They invoke the trope frequently, from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Facebook post praising President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem for deterring illegal immigration to a speech by Vice President JD Vance in which he lambasted European nations for their anti-hate speech laws. In Western films, where the trope originates, the archetypical “new sheriff” arrives in a frontier town ruled by corrupt or incompetent lawmen, deposes them, and establishes a new order that promises a truer form of justice. In the month since Trump returned to Washington, purges in every major part of the federal law enforcement apparatus have left it beyond doubt that a reordering is underway. However, the kind of justice that Trump’s emerging order will produce largely remains to be seen. The task of forging this order will fall to the new wave of conservative officials appointed to replace their mostly non-partisan predecessors.
To lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s premier federal law enforcement agency, the Trump administration has appointed a pair of loyalists, Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Both have a skeptical relationship with the agency. Patel, an embittered former federal prosecutor, spearheaded the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee investigation into the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia. During this investigation, the CIA criminally referred him to the Justice Department (DOJ) after he allegedly disclosed classified intelligence related to the investigation to people without clearances. Patel was ultimately not charged with a crime. Patel has asserted that the FBI is part of the “deep state” and even proposed turning the bureau’s headquarters into a museum showcasing its crimes. Multiple FBI officials made Patel’s so-called “enemies list” of government officials supposedly part of the “deep state,” including former Directors James Comey and Christopher Wray. If anything, Bongino, a prominent right-wing podcast host, has been an even more virulent critic, arguing without evidence that the bureau hid information about the pipe bombs planted outside the Democratic and Republican National Conventions because they were part of an “inside job” to frame Trump supporters for the violence.
Given their appointment of two men who hold the agency in contempt to its highest positions, it is unsurprising that the Trump administration has also sought to purge disfavored individuals from the bureau. Under the direction of Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, eight senior executives were fired, and an additional seven executive assistant directors (who had led the bureau's Criminal, Cyber, Human Resources, Information and Technology, National Security, Response and Services, and Science and Technology branches) were demoted. Bove, who previously served as one of Trump's personal defense attorneys, has also sought the names of all FBI agents who worked on cases related to the January 6th Capitol riot. That effort concluded with a legal agreement not to publicly reveal the names of agents who worked on those cases without giving them two days’ notice and the opportunity to contest the decision in court. Despite this seeming victory, one of the agents most strongly resisted Bove’s attempt to access the names, James Dennehy, was forced out not long after the agreement was signed. Dennehy, who led the FBI’s New York field office, had told his staff that he would “dig in” in response to the firings of senior FBI leaders.
Retaliation against those who worked on Capitol riot cases has not confined itself to the FBI. The interim U.S. Attorney for Washington D.C., Ed Martin, has overseen the demotion and firing of prosecutors who worked on cases related to the January 6th attack, as well as the forced resignation of a prosecutor who refused to freeze Biden-era environmental funds. Martin, who previously represented three Capitol riot defendants, recently referred to himself and those working under him as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers”. Martin has expressed openness towards pursuing other political goals on behalf of the Trump administration, including threatening to prosecute Democratic lawmakers for statements that he argues are tantamount to incitement of violence. Martin’s office has sent legal threat letters to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Representative Robert Garcia (D-CA), accusing them of threatening violence against their political opponents. In particular, Schumer’s comments, in which he stated that Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch had “released the whirlwind” and “w[ould] pay the price” following a 2020 abortion-related case, caused a stir when they were made. Following condemnation from the American Bar Association, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Congressional Republicans, Schumer apologized on the Senate floor. Despite this widespread backlash, the letter from Martin was the first indication that Schumer might face legal consequences for his remarks, which likely do not meet the legal standard for true threats.
Perhaps the most dramatic showdown between Trump’s appointees and the old order came in the Justice Department’s Southern District of New York (SDNY), an office with such a reputation for independence that it has been nicknamed “the sovereign district.” Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, once again serves as the administration’s chosen enforcer. Bove, a former SDNY prosecutor, has a complicated relationship with his old office, having been investigated there multiple times for allegations of abusive behavior towards his subordinates. The recent clash occurred after Bove ordered interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon to dismiss a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, who was charged in September with accepting bribes from Türkiye. Sassoon, a registered Republican and member of the Federalist Society who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, refused to do so, instead accusing Bove of arranging a quid pro quo in a letter to his boss, Attorney General Pam Bondi. According to Sassoon’s account, Adams’ lawyers informed Bove that the mayor would only be able to assist the administration in conducting immigration enforcement if the charges against him were dropped. Sassoon then offered to resign if the Department of Justice was still unwilling to allow the case to go on. Bove responded with a blistering eight-page letter accusing Sassoon of insubordination, accepting her resignation, placing the line prosecutors working on the case on leave, and defending the decision to dismiss the case. Bove accused the prosecution of being politically motivated, echoing allegations made by Adams’ lawyers that the Biden administration had prosecuted him in retaliation for his criticism of their immigration policy. Bove also defended the idea that advancing the Trump administration’s immigration policy was a legitimate reason to drop the case. Following Sassoon’s forced resignation, seven other lawyers, comprising nearly all of the supervisors in the SDNY’s Public Integrity unit, resigned. One of them, Hagan Scotten, another conservative who clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts, accused the administration of choosing to dismiss the case without prejudice in order to use the threat of reopening the case as leverage against the mayor, calling any lawyer who would obey the directive to dismiss the case a “fool” or a “coward.” The morning after the mass resignations took place, Bove summoned the remainder of the Public Integrity unit to a meeting in which he informed them that he wanted a prosecutor from the unit to cosign the motion to dismiss. He then left the unit time to decide who would sign the motion. After a discussion in which the unit reportedly considered resigning en masse, Edward Sullivan, an experienced anti-corruption prosecutor who is nearing retirement, offered to sign the motion, supposedly to avoid a mass firing. The dismissal was filed just hours later. Around the same time, Eric Adams gave federal immigration agents access to the jail complex on Rikers Island, becoming one of the first public officials outside of the administration to accede to its demands under legal pressure. During the old order, the apolitical nature of America’s federal law enforcement institutions was assumed but rarely felt. Now that the officials who defined and defended these institutions are gone, the Adams case shows the consequences of their removal.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth became the latest Trump administration official to move against his department’s law enforcement apparatus with his firing of the top Judge Advocate Generals (JAGs) for the Army, Air Force, and Navy. The JAG Corps forms the core of the US military’s criminal justice system, fulfilling a variety of roles from prosecuting and defending accused criminals to advising senior military leaders on the legality of their actions. It is this latter role that has earned them Hegseth’s ire. Hegseth, a consistent defender of American war criminals, blamed JAGs (derided in his book The War on Warriors as “jagoffs”) for imposing restrictive rules of engagement that he believes crippled the American war effort in Afghanistan. Hegseth has only just begun to replace the fired JAGs, recently appointing his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a commander in the Naval Reserve JAG corps. Parlatore previously served as defense counsel for two Navy SEALs: Eddie Gallagher, who was demoted for photographing himself posing with a corpse, and another SEAL who was charged with sexual assault. In a letter to Congress, five former Defense Secretaries, including one former Marine Corps General James Mattis, who served during the previous Trump administration, have denounced the firings of the JAGs and other military leaders, condemning what they saw as the President removing constraints on his power. Their letter was hardly necessary. At a press conference a few days earlier, Hegseth had all but said as much, stating that the fired lawyers would have been “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”
Intent is often difficult to discern in the actions of the Trump administration, particularly as its reign remains in its early stages. However, Trump has shown a repeated tendency to appoint officials to the leadership of agencies that they have reason to despise. Kash Patel, who launched his career in conservative politics attacking the credibility of the Russia investigation, sees the FBI as a tool of the deep state. Ed Martin represented Capitol rioters imprisoned by the office he now leads. Emil Bove gutted the DOJ office where he had faced multiple investigations. Pete Hegseth, who had always chafed at the idea of men in suits telling men in boots how to fight, was given authority over the JAG corps. From the President down, a sense that they have been greatly wronged - and that retribution is necessary - pervades the Trump administration. Now that they have struck against their enemies in the government, nearly all of whom are either gone or on their way out, what comes next is unclear. What is clear is that the sheriffs of the old order are gone. The lawmen who run Washington now prize a single virtue: loyalty. Those who can’t get behind that had best be on their way.