- Christina Bobb is at the forefront of Trump's legal battle against the DOJ over the Mar-a-Lago raid.
- She previously worked at the far-right OAN network and the Marine Corps, and once ran for Congress.
- Insider spoke to experts and colleagues, who described her as a staunch Trump acolyte.
On June 3, three FBI agents and a Justice Department official met with Donald Trump and his lawyers in the dining room of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida club he moved to after his presidency.
The officials were there to retrieve all remaining classified documents in Trump's possession as part of a subpoena issued a month earlier.
Christina Bobb, one of Trump's lawyers, signed a letter attesting that a "diligent search" had been conducted and all material that was in Mar-a-Lago at the time had been returned to the US government, per a court filing.
But two months later, on August 8, the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, uncovering 20 boxes worth of new material, including 11 sets that were marked as classified.
The discovery raised serious doubts about Bobb's statement and prompted questions about who she is, how she got the top job with the former president, and what legal trouble she may now face.
Bobb did not respond to Insider's request for an interview.
Early career
Bobb, 39, was born in Michigan and is the youngest of two girls, USA Today reported. As a teenager, she moved to Arizona, where she later attended the University of Arizona.
While there, Bobb was an avid athlete and played for her college soccer team as a goalkeeper, according to her athlete profile.
The profile described her as a "hardworking" student who was majoring in linguistics and wanted to work as a translator. It is unclear how many languages she speaks. The University of Arizona did not respond to Insider's request for comment.
In 2008, Bobb was admitted to the California State Bar after studying at the California Western School of Law, according to a biography on the Department of Homeland Security's website.
She went on to get a master's degree in national-security law from Georgetown University before joining the US Marine Corps as a judge advocate, where she provided legal advice to military commanders in Afghanistan, the biography said.
'Mega MAGA'
Bobb tried her hand in politics for the first time in 2014, running for Congress as an independent in California's 53rd District. She won just 929 votes out of 88,953 in the race, coming last among the eight other candidates in the blanket primary, according to Ballotpedia.
Bobb moved on from her defeat, taking government jobs in departments crucial to enacting Trump's agenda. In 2018 she became an executive secretary at the DHS, and later worked for Customs and Border Patrol as an executive director of policy, USA Today reported.
Some DHS officials who worked with Bobb at the time told USA Today that there was concern that she couldn't be trusted with certain types of classified information because she was "mega MAGA" in her outlook.
In June 2020, with Trump still in office, Bobb started working as an anchor for the far-right cable channel One America News Network, where she covered the White House.
During her time on the channel and especially after the 2020 presidential election, Bobb made no secret of her love for Trump and pushed his baseless claims of election fraud.
In July 2021 — six months after Joe Biden became president — she posted a photo showing her interviewing Trump, with the caption: "My president."
She also used her role at OAN to raise more than $600,000 to support the Arizona election audit in Maricopa County last year. Trump called for the audit after losing the state to Biden; it did not find any widespread fraud.
"Christina Bobb's singular beat at OAN was fighting so-called election fraud, she just pumped out lies," Bobby Lewis, a researcher at the Media Matters watchdog, told Insider. "She is as true a believer as Trump himself."
Lewis described her career as a "revolving door where everything is ultimately spinning around Trump."
'Doesn't surprise me at all'
It was Bobb's relentless efforts to contest the election results that eventually caught Trump's eye, The Daily Beast reported.
She started volunteering for his legal team in November 2020 while continuing her duties at the network.
She left OAN to work full-time for Trump in March 2022, she told the "Coffee and a Mike" podcast, adding that he personally asked for her to join the team.
"He knew a lot of the efforts I was taking, through OAN," she said. "We had a good relationship."
Pearson Sharp, who worked with Bobb at OAN, told Insider: "The fact that she's working for Trump doesn't surprise me at all," Sharp added. "If I were Trump, I would want someone like her representing me as well."
Possible legal troubles
Bobb, like her boss, faces legal issues of her own.
On the morning of January 6, 2021, Bobb was inside the "war room" at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in DC with Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, two Trump attorneys who had been central to his efforts to overturn the election, The Washington Post reported.
This prompted the House committee investigating the Capitol riot to subpoena her and five other lawyers in March, though she has yet to testify.
The subpoena only marked the start of potential legal trouble for Bobb.
In a legal filing last month, the DOJ alleged that Bobb and Evan Corcoran, another Trump lawyer, misled prosecutors by saying they had handed over all classified documents from Mar-a-Lago.
Experts said the filing could build a legal case that Bobb and Corcoran obstructed the government's investigation, and urged both lawyers to get lawyers of their own.
"Bobb certainly, at a minimum, is a material-fact witness in the context of the government's inquiry into possible obstruction and efforts to conceal the records located at Mar-a-Lago," Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in national security, told Insider.
"It is not out of the realm of possibility that the government ... will at least seek a court order compelling her to testify before the grand jury, citing the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege."
Bobb has since gone on television on multiple occasions to defend Trump and attack the DOJ over the raid — a tactic Moss said was not advisable.
"She should arguably be more focused on preparing a viable defense to a potential indictment than spouting off talking points on Fox News," he said.
"She should stay off of TV at this point, as [she] is only making the situation worse."
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