The Trump Department of Justice Executor is no stranger to complaints about his conduct

Bove has adopted that view. In a letter that expels more than half a dozen FBI executives of the FBI on January 31, Bove wrote that officials needed to clean the house because the FBI had “actively participated in what the president adequately described as a” “national serious injustice “That has been perpetrated on the American people.”

His actions, particularly their aggressive attacks against the FBI, have left the former stunned colleagues.

“It’s not like the Emil I met,” said Chris O’Leary, a retired FBI agent who served as an anti -terrorism supervisor in New York City and knew Bove as an effective prosecutor and “a good partner.” O’Leary said Bove actively participated in investigations related to January 6 in the New York area and never indicated any concern about the way in which consultations were managed.

O’Leary added: “It is almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

It is not clear how much more time Bove will serve in the role of the interim attached attorney general. Trump has nominated Todd BlancheAnother of his lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, for that position. If the Senate confirms Blanche, as expected, Bove will become Blanche’s main advisor, as the main attached attorney general. It is one of the most powerful works of the Department of Justice.

From his university days as Captain of the Lacrosse team at the University of Albany, Bove stood out for his intellect and ethics of exhausting work, according to interviews with whom they know him.

The law is executed in the Bove family. His father was a prosecutor in the state of New York. After graduating from the Law Faculty of the University of Georgetown, Bove was an employee of two federal judges appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican. Then he spent nine years at the United States Prosecutor’s Office in Manhattan, where he specialized in the prosecution of the king of drugs and alleged terrorists.

He headed the accusation of the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, about drug trafficking positions as well as the brother of the president of Honduras. And successfully prosecuted a Hezbollah operation that planned attacks in New York.

However, when bringing such cases, Bove was ground to other prosecutors and defense lawyers.

The AP spoke with 11 defense lawyers who raised questions about the tactics and aggressive behavior of Bove. A former colleague of the Department of Justice reminded Bove having tried to Bigfoot other districts to take care of high profile cases. And a defense lawyer said he watched in shock while Bove shouted his client, a drug trafficker from Latin America, who did not give him the answers he wanted even though he was cooperating with the United States government in an important investigation of narcotics.

Most of the lawyers spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared reprisals for speaking.

The complaints culminated in March 2018. It was then that the head of the Federal Public Defender’s office at Manhattan collected criticism about BOVE of eight defense lawyers. He compiled the criticism and sent the ideas in an email to two senior officials of the Office of the United States prosecutor, according to people familiar with the letter who were not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke under condition of anonymity.

“It is a real and recurring problem, and does not represent the office of the way I think it would be represented,” wrote David Patton, the public defender at that time, in the email, which was reviewed by Associated Press. Patton did not respond to a request for an interview.

Approximately 18 months after the email was sent, Bove was promoted to be the co -president of the National Security and Narcotics Unit of the office. In that role, he supervised Maduro’s accusation, who was accused of leading a poster of high -ranking security officials who tried to flood the United States with cocaine. Maduro, who in January swore for a third term, remains the objective of an American reward of $ 15 million. He has dismissed the criminal case as part of a continuous attempt by Washington to get him out of office.

By 2020, a team of prosecutors that Bove directed was defending the accusations of having involved in what a judge described as prosecuting conduct. The actions came in the prosecution of an Iranian banker accused of violating the sanctions of the United States. At the trial, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad’s lawyers alleged that prosecutors had not delivered evidence they considered beneficial to their client.

The United States District Court Judge Alison Nathan, pushed prosecutors to obtain answers. Bove, as a unit’s supervisor, was involved in trying to mitigate the consequences, according to hundreds of emails and text messages among prosecutors, Nathan ordered in 2021 at the request of the AP on Bove objections.

In an exchange of text messages from Sunday night with his co-chief after being admonished by Nathan in the Court, Bove acknowledged that his prosecutors had said a “flat lie” to the judge. He also promised to “crush” the Iranian defendant, made a lascivious comment about one of his lawyers and joke told a colleague that “we will get cocaine for you” so that she could pull one night to repair some of the damages.

While Nathan did not find that Bove’s team had retained the documents intentionally, the judge, however, determined that there had been “fiscal misconduct.” He discovered that prosecutors had been involved in a “deliberate attempt to obscure” the truth and sought to “bury” a potentially exculpatory document. .

The judge launched the conviction and dismissed the charges. He asked the Department of Justice to launch prosecutors. The results of this investigation echoed the conclusion of Nathan, that the realization of the trial team was “defective” but did not reach the level of “intentional or reckless behavior”, according to a 2023 investigation summary of the office of the office of Professional responsibility of the Department of Justice. .

Bove left the government at the end of 2021 and became a defense lawyer. By 2023, he had joined Trump’s legal team.

___

Contact the Global AP research team at [email protected] or