Oval Office Becomes a Diorama of Power Dynamics as Trump Goes After Rivals

The nation’s three most powerful law enforcement officials — Attorney General Pam Bondi and her top deputy, Todd Blanche, along with Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director — padded into the Oval Office on Wednesday for a public show of unity and to herald some recent successes.

They left about an hour later, after President Trump tossed out, offhandedly, three names of people he wanted prosecuted: Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two criminal indictments against him; Andrew Weissmann, a former F.B.I. official who was a lead prosecutor for the team investigating the Trump campaign’s possible ties to Russia in the 2016 election; and Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal,” he told the three administration officials, who have tried — with a few notable exceptions — to do what he wants.

They smiled, nodded and shuffled in place as he spoke.

“His interviewer was Weissmann — I hope they’re going to look into Weissmann, too — Weissmann’s a bad guy,” Mr. Trump added, referring to a recent event in which Mr. Smith appeared alongside Mr. Weissmann. “And he had somebody, Lisa, who was his puppet, worked in the office, really, as the top person. I think she should be looked at very strongly.”

It was a common enough example of second-term Trump theater-in-the-Oval. But it was also a diorama of the administration’s lopsided power dynamic between a president bent on controlling federal law enforcement and appointees unwilling or unable to fight for the historic independence of their institutions.

“Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” Mr. Smith told Mr. Weissmann in the Oct. 8 interview that captured Mr. Trump’s attention.

“There are rules in the department about how to bring a case — follow those rules,” Mr. Smith added. “You can’t say: ‘I want this outcome. Let me throw the rules out.’”

The president, who vowed to go after the “scum” who once investigated him, often calls for investigations of people he hates, including Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen.

But those threats appear to be gaining legal force.

At Mr. Trump’s urging, and often over the objections of career prosecutors, the Justice Department recently secured indictments against the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche warned that there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.

Charges in Maryland against John R. Bolton, a national security adviser during Mr. Trump’s first term, over whether he mishandled sensitive materials are likely to be filed soon, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

That investigation, which began to gain momentum under the Biden administration, is regarded as more viable and grounded in evidence, in the view of former department officials with knowledge of the case. At Wednesday’s appearance in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump also reiterated his demand that the department go after Senator Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who pushed for his impeachment as a member of the House.

There was no pushback, or even an effort to downplay it. That was by design.

Mr. Trump, who tried with limited success to bring the bureau and Justice Department under his control during his first term, has left little to chance in his second.

By installing Mr. Patel and other loyalists into top federal law enforcement posts, he has not only ensured their compliance but also established a cadre of political surrogates and lock-step messengers willing to cast aside core departmental norms to serve his political agenda.

The attorney general, speaking to the TV host Sean Hannity on Fox earlier this week, suggested — without offering evidence — that people protesting immigration enforcement raids were members of what she described as “organized crime” syndicates.

“They are no different than MS-13,” she said, referring to the notoriously violent El Salvadorean gang.

Earlier this month, the judge overseeing the criminal case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was deported to a megaprison in El Salvador in violation of a court order, criticized Mr. Blanche for his public statements about the case.

Mr. Patel, who wrote children’s books portraying Mr. Trump as a crowned monarch, has been even more solicitous of the president and thanked him repeatedly during the Oval Office news conference on Wednesday, crediting him for catching some of the bureau’s most wanted fugitives, as well as working out a way to pay agents during the government shutdown.

If Mr. Patel’s obeisance has become routine for second-term appointees, it is not consistent with the actions of his predecessors, who operated at a protective distance to preserve their power and autonomy.

J. Edgar Hoover, who founded the F.B.I. and presided over the first 48 years of its existence, was hardly above appearing at presidential photo ops, even when he knew he was there to validate a leader’s actions or political objectives. That was especially true late in his career, when he was a frequent visitor in the Johnson and Nixon White Houses.

But Hoover, despite his deep political conservatism and racism, was more a political operator than a partisan operative — and never viewed himself as a surrogate of the leaders in power during his time, said Beverly Gage, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for her biography of Mr. Hoover.

“Something Hoover really sought to avoid throughout his career was being seen as the tool of any one politician or any one party,” Ms. Gage said in an interview.

“A central part of Hoover’s career, and the careers of subsequent F.B.I. directors,” she added, “is that the bureau’s authority comes from its independence, not from its subservience to the White House.”