By JOSHUA GOODMAN, JIM MUSTIAN and ERIC TUCKER
WASHINGTON (AP) — A group of Manhattan criminal defense attorneys was so concerned about prosecutor Emil Bove’s professionalism that they banded together to send an email to his bosses.
One lawyer complained in the 2018 email that Bove was “completely reckless and out of control” in how he handled his cases. Another, upset about Bove’s rudeness and power plays, said he needed “adult supervision.” A third, a top federal public defender in the city, said “he cannot be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.”
Bove, then a hard-charging prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, was hardly chastened by the complaints.
Instead, he printed the email and pinned it on a cork board in his office for others to see, according to a person who worked with Bove. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly discuss a former colleague, said Bove considered the email to be a badge of honor.
Bove’s near decade as a prosecutor — a time in which he tackled high-profile cases amid complaints about his polarizing behavior — provides clues as to how he views his current role as President Donald Trump’s chief enforcer at the Justice Department. In just a month as the department’s acting No. 2 official, the little-known Bove has plowed through norms and niceties, whether scolding FBI leadership for “insubordination” in refusing his request to hand over the names of agents who investigated the January 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol or forcing out attorneys who worked those cases.
Earlier this month, he pressured former colleagues to drop charges against New York City’s mayor for reasons unrelated to the strength of the case, upending decades of Justice Department norms.
The moves have spurred intense criticism from legal scholars and former prosecutors. They worry that Bove, who represented Trump in federal and state criminal prosecutions, is settling scores for the president, not impartially running the Justice Department. Brushing aside such concerns, Bove has sought to aggressively implement Trump’s agenda in a way that is not at all surprising to many who knew him when he was litigating drug and terrorism cases.
“In my experience litigating against him, what he enjoyed most as a prosecutor was wielding power — the single worst possible trait for a public servant,” said Christine Chung, a former federal prosecutor who as a defense attorney has squared off against Bove. “But people won’t speak against him publicly because he’s also vindictive, as he is now making abundantly clear.”
The Justice Department declined to comment in response to an AP request to interview Bove along with a detailed list of questions about his past conduct.
“He’s doing the job that Trump got elected to do,” said Christopher Kise, who got to know Bove when they worked together on Trump’s legal defense team. “You have to let folks know you’re serious about taking control. The process can sometimes get messy but if you’re going to bake a cake, you’ve got to break some eggs.”
Kise added he was surprised by the portrayal of Bove by former colleagues as a villain bent on enforcing Trump’s agenda at any cost.
“He’s exceptionally intelligent,” Kise said, “and respectful of differing viewpoints.”
Turmoil at the Justice Department
As acting deputy attorney general, Bove has been instrumental in leading the effort to reshape the FBI and Justice Department, moving to identify agents involved in investigations of the Capitol riot and making clear to prosecutors his expectation that they follow his orders.
On Feb. 14, for instance, he convened a call with prosecutors in the Justice Department’s public integrity section and gave them an hour to pick two people to file the motion to dismiss charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, even though other prosecutors had already resigned over the directive to toss the case.
Particularly startling was his order for the FBI to turn over a list of thousands of agents who participated in Jan. 6 investigations, a request seen by some in the bureau as a precursor to a purge.
The scrutiny of career FBI agents is highly unusual given that rank-and-file agents do not select their cases.
The attack on the Capitol left more than 100 police officers injured as the angry mob of Trump supporters — some armed with poles, bats and bear spray — overwhelmed law enforcement, shattered windows and sent lawmakers and aides running into hiding. Trump has spent the better part of four years downplaying the seriousness of the attack and blaming federal authorities for cracking down too harshly on his supporters.
Bove has embraced that view. In a letter ousting more than a half-dozen top FBI executives on Jan. 31, Bove wrote that officials needed to clean house because the FBI had “actively participated in what the president appropriately described as a ‘grave national injustice’ that has been perpetrated upon the American people.”
His actions, particularly his aggressive attacks on the FBI, have left former colleagues befuddled.
“It’s so not like the Emil that I knew,” said Chris O’Leary, a retired FBI agent who served as a counterterrorism supervisor in New York City and knew Bove as an effective prosecutor and “a good partner.” O’Leary noted that Bove was actively involved in Jan. 6-related investigations in the New York area and never indicated any concerns about the way the inquiries were handled.
O’Leary added: “It’s almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
It is not clear how much longer Bove will serve in the role of acting deputy attorney general. Trump has nominated Todd Blanche, another one of his attorneys and a former federal prosecutor, for that post. If Blanche is confirmed by the Senate – as is expected – Bove will become Blanche’s top adviser, serving as the principal associate deputy attorney general. It is among the most powerful jobs in the Justice Department.
Star Prosecutor
From his college days as captain of the lacrosse team at the University at Albany, Bove stood out for his sharp intellect and grueling work ethic, according to interviews with those who know him.
The law runs in Bove’s family. His father was a prosecutor in New York state. After graduating from Georgetown University law school, Bove clerked for two federal judges appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican. He then spent nine years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan where he specialized in prosecuting drug kingpins and alleged terrorists.
He spearheaded the indictment of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, on drug trafficking charges as well as the brother of Honduras’ president. And he successfully prosecuted a Hezbollah operative who plotted attacks in New York.
In bringing such cases, however, Bove irked fellow prosecutors and defense attorneys.
The AP spoke with 11 defense attorneys who raised questions about Bove’s aggressive tactics and behavior. A former Justice Department colleague recalled Bove trying to bigfoot other districts to take over high-profile cases. And a defense attorney said he watched in shock as Bove yelled at his client, a drug trafficker from Latin America, who didn’t give him the answers he wanted even though he was cooperating with the U.S. government in a major narcotics investigation.
Most of the attorneys spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation for speaking out.
The complaints culminated in March 2018. That’s when the head of the federal public defender’s office in Manhattan collected criticism about Bove from eight defense attorneys. He compiled the critiques and forwarded the insights in an email to two top officials in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, according to people familiar with the missive who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“He’s a real, recurrent problem, and he’s not representing the office in the way that I think you would want it represented,” David Patton, the public defender at the time, wrote in the email, which was reviewed by The Associated Press. Patton did not respond to a request for an interview.
About 18 months after the email was sent, Bove was promoted to be co-chief of the office’s national security and international narcotics unit. In that role, he oversaw the indictment of Maduro, who was accused of heading a cartel of high-ranking security officials that were trying to flood the U.S. with cocaine. Maduro – who in January was sworn in for a third term – remains the target of a $15 million U.S. bounty. He has dismissed the criminal case as part of an ongoing attempt by Washington to remove him from office.
Prosecutorial misconduct
By 2020, a team of prosecutors Bove led was fending off allegations of having engaged in what a judge described as prosecutorial misconduct. The actions came in the prosecution of an Iranian banker accused of violating U.S. sanctions. At trial, attorneys for Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad alleged prosecutors had failed to hand over evidence they considered beneficial to their client.
U.S. District Court Judge Alison Nathan pushed prosecutors for answers. Bove, as a supervisor of the unit, was involved in trying to blunt the fallout, according to hundreds of pages of emails and text messages between prosecutors Nathan ordered released in 2021 at the request of the AP over Bove’s objections.
In a Sunday night text exchange with his co-chief after being admonished by Nathan in court, Bove acknowledged his prosecutors had told a “flat lie” to the judge. He also vowed to “smash” the Iranian defendant, made a lewd comment about one of his attorneys and jokingly told a colleague that “we will get cocaine for you” so she could pull an all-nighter to repair some of the damage.
While Nathan did not find Bove’s team had intentionally withheld documents, the judge nevertheless determined there had been “prosecutorial misconduct.” She found that prosecutors had engaged in a “deliberate attempt to obscure” the truth and sought to “bury” a potentially exculpatory document. “The disclosure failures and misrepresentations in this case,” she wrote in a 2021 opinion, “represent grave derelictions of prosecutorial responsibility.”
The judge tossed the conviction and dismissed the charges. She asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation of the prosecutors. That probe echoed Nathan’s conclusion, finding that prosecutors’ actions were “flawed” but not intentional or reckless, according to an anonymized summary of the investigation published on the Justice Department’s website. A person familiar with the probe confirmed the summary referred to the Sadr case.
Bove left the government in late 2021 and became a defense attorney. By 2023, he had joined Trump’s legal team.
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
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