In the months after the Jan. 6 attacks, a hard-charging federal prosecutor in Manhattan eagerly oversaw efforts to find and arrest Capitol rioters in the New York area, his former colleagues say, and even proposed to the Justice Department that his office should play a central role in the investigation.
His name: Emil Bove.
Bove, whose prominence soared when he was one of Donald Trump’s defense lawyers last year, is now the Trump-appointed acting deputy attorney general, essentially the chief operating officer of the Justice Department.
He has been leading an effort to identify everyone who worked on Jan. 6 cases and remedy what Trump called “a grave national injustice” by rooting out “those who acted with corrupt or partisan intent” when they investigated Trump and Capitol rioters.
Some who know Bove have been shocked by the turnabout. On Jan. 6, 2021, Bove was helping lead the counterterrorism section in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan when a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. Over the next several months, he worked closely with FBI agents as they hunted down suspects in the New York area.
Two former colleagues who worked alongside Bove on Jan. 6 cases in New York say they never heard him express qualms about the sprawling Capitol riot criminal investigation, which grew into the largest in American history.
“He treated these cases as a priority,” said Christopher O’Leary, who sat in meetings with Bove as a senior FBI counterterrorism agent. “In my daily interactions with him, there was never any indication of anything other than full-throated support.”
Bove is set to become the deputy to his former law partner Todd Blanche, who has been nominated to fill the job Bove now holds, deputy attorney general.
Through a Justice Department spokesman, Bove declined to answer questions for this article.
Weekly Jan. 6 meetings
O’Leary and a former senior Justice Department prosecutor who asked not to be named while discussing internal matters said Bove attended weekly morning meetings about Jan. 6 cases chaired by the senior FBI official in New York.
The group of prosecutors and law enforcement agents planned and prioritized efforts to find and arrest Jan. 6 defendants, based on intelligence coming in from around the country.
“Emil gave very clear direction to aggressively work to support FBI’s effort to write warrants, pen registers, etc.,” the former prosecutor told NBC News, referring to an FBI technology that records incoming phone numbers.
He said Bove even “made a push with our leadership counterparts at NSD” — the Justice Department’s National Security Division in Washington — to play a leading role in the response to Jan. 6, the former prosecutor said. “The idea was we have the counterterrorism expertise, we should run this.”
In the end, that job fell to the U.S. attorney in Washington and the FBI field office there. But federal prosecutors and FBI agents in New York continued to search for Jan. 6 defendants.
They included Samuel Fisher, a Capitol rioter who was arrested in Manhattan two weeks after the attack with a thousand rounds of ammunition and several weapons. He was sentenced to 3½ years on the weapons charges, but a Trump pardon erased his Jan. 6 guilty plea.
“Emil was up half the night preparing for that arrest,” the former prosecutor said.
The second Trump administration
Since Trump took office last month, Bove has been the face of the effort to demand that the FBI hand over the names of every bureau employee who worked on Jan. 6 cases.
“The FBI — including the Bureau’s prior leadership — actively participated in what President Trump appropriately described as ‘a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated on the American people over the last four years’ with respect to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Bove wrote in a memo to FBI leadership demanding a list of all FBI employees who had investigated the riot.
Bove omitted that he, too, had investigated Jan. 6 cases.
Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, who noted that he and thousands of other FBI personnel would be on that list, initially resisted providing the names to Bove, instead turning over employee ID numbers. Bove called that “insubordination” in another memo and later ordered Driscoll to provide the names, which he did. FBI agents on the list say they fear they will be fired or demoted.
A sprawling investigation
The Justice Department under Merrick Garland made a priority of trying to prosecute everyone who illegally entered the Capitol because, as Garland repeatedly said, he and other top officials considered what happened an attack on American democracy.
After the number of estimated illegal entrants to the Capitol — initially thought to be around 800 — ballooned to more than 3,500, some defense lawyers and former Justice Department officials criticized the broad undertaking as overzealous. They argued that prosecutors should have focused on those who committed violence.
As the years passed, some FBI agents and prosecutors across the country also privately questioned the use of resources on minor figures, some have told NBC News, even as they supported efforts to hold ringleaders and people who violently attacked police officers accountable.
Prosecutors who worked on the investigation say the lines they drew — focusing on charging those who either entered the Capitol itself or committed acts of violence or property destruction outside it — were a reasonable use of prosecutorial discretion.
Matthew Graves, the former U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who oversaw the investigation, has pointed out that the government theoretically could have charged anyone it could prove knowingly entered the restricted area outside the Capitol.
Many prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases see the questions about whether they should have narrowed their focus in the early days as Monday morning quarterbacking. They say they operated with the best information they had at the time. Moreover, they point out that the broad parameters of the investigation were set out in the early days of the investigation by a Trump administration-appointed U.S. attorney.
If Bove felt the Justice Department was overreaching, he never mentioned it at the many meetings devoted to pursuing Jan. 6 defendants, O’Leary and the former prosecutor who worked with Bove say.
No credible evidence has publicly emerged that any FBI agent or federal prosecutor did anything improper in the estimated 2,400 Jan. 6 investigations. The vast majority of criminal charges resulted in guilty pleas or convictions — a process under which defense attorneys would have a chance to present any evidence of misconduct.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump and his allies from portraying all of the investigations as politically motivated. Trump’s pardoning of all the Jan. 6 defendants, including those who assaulted police officers, on his first day back in office hasn’t stopped calls for vengeance against law enforcement officials.
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, whom Trump’s pardon freed from a 22-year prison sentence for sedition, told USA Today that he wanted criminal investigations of the FBI agents and lawyers who brought the cases.
“When I say, ‘Feel the heat,’ I want to be clear that I want investigations,” Tarrio said.
Bove’s firsthand experience
Jason Manning, a former federal prosecutor who worked Jan. 6 cases, told NBC News that Bove’s firsthand experience with Jan. 6 cases would have assured him there was no “national mischarge of justice,” as Trump has claimed.
Manning said it was surprising that Bove would be involved in an effort to gather a list of people at the FBI who worked Jan. 6 cases and to fire some federal prosecutors who were in the former Capitol Siege Section, since they would have been his colleagues.
“He knows better,” Manning said. “If he thought there was something improper about how they were being pursed, he had an obligation to say something.
“Those of us who worked on these cases firmly believe that the record stands,” he added. “That record shows that hundreds of individuals were lawfully convicted based on overwhelming evidence. And according to the reporting, the record also shows that Emil Bove actively contributed to that effort. Mr. Bove can’t change that record now.”
Alexis Loeb, a former senior Capitol riot prosecutor, said Bove’s actions aren’t what she would expect of a federal prosecutor who knew the details of Jan. 6 cases.
“I would be surprised how anyone who saw the facts of these cases up close could play a role in terminating some of the prosecutors involved,” Loeb said. “Or suggest that it was unethical to prosecute the massive number of assaults on police and attack on the Capitol.”
Another former federal prosecutor who worked Jan. 6 cases said Bove had “joined the administration’s efforts in whitewashing the history of the attack on the Capitol” and “adopted the president’s ridiculous recharacterization of history that the investigation into the riot was a ‘grave national injustice,’ despite that Bove was one of the individuals leading the charge in Manhattan during the investigation.”
A current law enforcement official said Bove’s statements and actions since Trump took office last month had irrevocably and unfairly tarnished public trust in the Justice Department.
“The amount of damage he has inflicted on the department in just three weeks is impossible to overstate,” the official said. “Assuming the department survives this, it will take a very long time to recover its legitimacy in the eyes of the public and its own career attorneys.”
Multiple FBI agents, many of whom were ordered to work on Jan. 6 cases, told NBC News they were worried that they might lose their jobs because they obeyed orders.
“I was assigned to investigate a potential crime,” an agent wrote. “Like all previous cases I have investigated, this one met every legal standard of predication and procedure.”
“Without bias, I upheld my oath to this country and the Constitution and collected the facts,” the agent said. “I am now sitting in my home, listening to my children play and laugh in the backyard, oblivious to the prospect that their father may be fired in a few days. Fired for conducting a legally authorized investigation. Fired for doing the job that he was hired to do.”