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

By Joshua Goodman, Jim Mustian and Eric Tucker

Washington (AP) – A group of Criminal Defense lawyers from Manhattan was so concerned about the professionalism of prosecutor Emil Bove that they joined to send an email to their bosses.

A lawyer complained in the 2018 email that Bove was “completely reckless and out of control” in how he handled his cases. Another, annoying of rudeness and power plays, said he needed “adult supervision.” A third, a main federal public defender in the city, said “cannot be bothered to treat minor mortals with respect or empathy.”

Bove, Then, a hard cargo prosecutor in the United States prosecutor for the Southern District of New YorkHe was barely punished for complaints.

Instead, he printed email and covered it in a cork meeting in his office so that others would see it, according to a person who worked with Bove. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak frankly to a former colleague, said Bove considered that email was an honor badge.

The almost decade of Bove as a prosecutor, an era in which he addressed high -profile cases amid complaints about his polarizing behavior, provides clues about how he sees his current role as the main executor of President Donald Trump in the Department of Justice. In just a month as an official of Department No. 2, the little known Bove has advanced through norms and subtleties, If you scolding FBI’s leadership for “insubordination” By rejecting your request to deliver the names of the agents who investigated the January 2021 Assault in the Capitol of the United States or Forcing the lawyers who worked those cases.

Earl this month, He pressed the former colleagues to leave the charges against the mayor of New York City For reasons not related to the strength of the case, flying decades of norms of the Department of Justice.

The movements have stimulated the intense criticism of legal and former prosecutors. They worry that Bove who represented Trump in federal and state criminal prosecutorsIt is solving scores for the president, not impartially directing the Department of Justice. Leaving aside such concerns, Bove has tried to aggressively implement Trump’s agenda in a way that is not surprising for many who knew him when he was litigating cases of drugs and terrorism.

“In my experience, litigating against him, what I enjoyed as a prosecutor was an entangier power: the worst possible feature for a public servant,” said Christine Chung, a former federal prosecutor who, as a defense lawyer, has faced Bove. “But people will not speak against them because it is also vindictive, since they are now making clear.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment in response to an AP request to interview Bove along with a detailed list of questions about his past behavior.

“He is doing the work Trump was chosen to do,” said Christopher Kise, who met Bove when they worked together in Trump’s legal defense team. “You have to let people know the control seriously. The process can sometimes mess up, but if you are going to bake a cake, you have to break some eggs. “

Kise added that he was surprised by Bove’s interpretation by former colleagues as a villain determined to enforce Trump’s agenda at any cost.

“It’s exceptionally intelligent,” said Kise, “and respectful of different points of view.”

Archive: Lawyer Emil Bove is the day of a sentence hearing in the criminal case in which President -elect Donald Trump was sentenced in 2024 for charges involving money from silence paid to a porn star, outside the Criminal Court of New York in Manhattan in New York City, January 10, 2025. (Brendan McDermid, photo of the pool through AP, file)

Agitation in the Department of Justice

As an interim attached attorney general, Bove has been essential to lead the effort to remodel the department of the FBI and justice, moving to identify the agents involved in the investigations of the Capitol’s riots and make clear to the prosecutors their expectation that They follow their orders.

February 14, for example, convened a call with prosecutors in the public integrity section of the Department of Justice And he gave them an hour to choose two people to present the motion to dismiss charges against the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, although other prosecutors had already renounced the board to throw the case.

Particularly its order was surprising for the FBI to deliver a list of thousands of agents who participated in the investigations of January 6, a request seen by some in the office as a precursor of a purge.

The scrutiny of FBI’s professional agents is very unusual since base agents do not select their cases.

The attack on the Capitol left more than 100 injured police officers such as the angry crowd of Trump’s supporters, some armed with posts, bats and bear spray, overwhelmed the police, shattered windows and sent legislators and assistants who hide. Trump has spent most of the four years minimizing the seriousness of the attack and blaming federal authorities for taking energetic measures to his followers.

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.

Star prosecutor

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.

Prosecutor’s misconduct

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 determined that there had been a “misconduct of prosecution.” He discovered that prosecutors had involved in a “deliberate attempt to obscure” the truth and sought to “bury” a potentially exculpatory document. “The dissemination failures and misrepresentations in this case,” he wrote in an opinion of 2021, “they represent serious abandonments of fiscal responsibility.”

The judge launched the conviction and dismissed the charges. He asked the Department of Justice to launch prosecutors. That investigation echoed the conclusion of Nathan, discovering that the actions of prosecutors were “defective” but unintentional or reckless, according to a Anonymous Research Summary Published on the website of the Department of Justice. A person familiar with the probe confirmed the summary referred to the SADR case.

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

Originally published: February 24, 2025 at 12:54 pm