There is no one who hates Emil Bove III more than his fellow lawyers. When the acting second-in-command at the Justice Department bigfooted in to blow up the prosecution of New York City mayor Eric Adams last week, his fellow lawyers laced into him on social media.
“This fucker would get ejected out of a mass grave for ruining the vibe,” former federal prosecutor Ken White snarked on Bluesky.
It doesn’t help that the 43-year-old Bove looks like Abe Vigoda playing Sal Tessio. But perhaps the most apt comparison is to Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s erstwhile fixer: the gay, Jewish lawyer who persecuted Jewish intellectuals during the Red Scare, hounded homosexuals out of government service, got disbarred for stealing from a client, and finally died of AIDS after denying he was H.I.V.-positive.
Cohn and Bove both betrayed their own tribe, and no one loves an apostate.
Emil Bove spent his childhood in Seneca Falls, a tiny town in the Finger Lakes region, but in a real sense he grew up at the Southern District of New York (S.D.N.Y.). He began there as a paralegal before attending law school at Georgetown. After a couple of prestigious clerkships and a stint in Big Law, he was back at S.D.N.Y., this time heading up the office’s National Security and International Narcotics Unit.
The former lacrosse champion, who married a health-policy analyst in 2012, was by all accounts a competent practitioner, albeit one given to aggressive displays of dominance. His interdepartmental memos were “stern and designed to intimidate,” John Fishwick Jr., a former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, told The Wall Street Journal. They also reported that his personal style was described as “abrasive and disarmingly direct.”
His office filed narco-terrorism charges against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, Russian and Chinese spies, and a Hezbollah operative. Under his supervision, it also botched the 2020 prosecution of an American businessman accused of violating sanctions on Iran, prompting a federal judge to suggest that the S.D.N.Y.’s flagrant discovery violations merited “a coordinated, systemic response from the highest levels of leadership.”
In 2022, he left S.D.N.Y. to work in the private sector, joining fellow S.D.N.Y. alum Todd Blanche the following year at what was functionally a bespoke law firm with one client: Donald Trump, who was being sued for assault and defamation by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and about to be criminally indicted in New York; Washington, D.C.; Florida; and Atlanta.
Together, Bove and Blanche mounted an aggressive defense, lobbing wild accusations of misconduct at prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions. Principally, they claimed that President Biden was directing a nationwide plot against his electoral rival, weaponizing both the Justice Department and state prosecutors in New York and Atlanta.
In a motion to dismiss the election case, they pointed to anonymously sourced stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times describing Biden’s private frustration with the slow pace of the Trump cases as evidence of a campaign to subliminally “exert pressure on prosecutors and investigators without engaging in direct communications.”
They secured a three-week delay in the false-business-records case in Manhattan by falsely accusing the district attorney of withholding evidence. They even accused the Justice Department of retaliating against Trump for declaring his candidacy by appointing Jack Smith as special counsel. In reality, Trump’s declaration obligated Attorney General Merrick Garland to hand off the Trump cases to avoid the obvious conflict of interest inherent in the Department of Justice investigating the president’s electoral rival.
U.S. district judge Tanya Chutkan chastised Bove and Blanche for “a pattern of defense filings focusing on political rhetoric rather than addressing the legal issues at hand,” calling it “unbefitting of experienced defense counsel and undermining of the judicial proceedings in this case.” And New York Supreme Court justice Juan Merchan remarked that Blanche and Bove had “resorted to language, indeed rhetoric, that has no place in legal pleadings” and had “come dangerously close to crossing the line of zealous representation and the professional advocacy one would expect from members of the bar and officers of the court.”
But litigators are famously aggressive. It was still possible to squint at Bove and Blanche and see lawyers pushing the envelope while continuing to do “normal law.” All that changed when Bove returned to the Justice Department last month and set about enacting the president’s revenge agenda.
“This fucker would get ejected out of a mass grave for ruining the vibe.”
First, he fired prosecutors who worked the January 6 cases, along with eight high-level F.B.I. officials. Then he demanded a list of all F.B.I. employees who had any involvement with the January 6 investigations. Bove insisted that he wasn’t conducting a purge, but only seeking to weed out anyone who “acted with corrupt or partisan intent.” In fact, Bove himself had worked on the January 6 cases before leaving S.D.N.Y., although presumably he won’t be demanding his own resignation.
On February 10, “EB3” issued a memo ordering Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to dismiss the case against Adams. The putative justification was that the former head of S.D.N.Y. had “threatened the integrity of the proceedings” by vaguely alluding to the case on his personal Web site after leaving office. (Judge Dale Ho had rejected this claim when Adams raised it in January.) Secondarily, Bove suggested that the prosecution “unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration.”
The memo was a screaming Klaxon of impropriety for lawyers everywhere, particularly those with experience at the Justice Department.
The wall between the White House and the D.O.J. is supposed to be sacrosanct. It’s the reason Trump’s alleged pressure on former F.B.I. director James Comey in 2017 to “go easy” on Mike Flynn was so scandalous. Just months ago, Bove moved for the dismissal of Trump’s criminal cases because, he alleged, the Biden White House was subliminally communicating with the attorney general. And yet here was Bove, explicitly demanding that the D.O.J. base prosecutorial decisions on the president’s political priorities.
Sassoon, who was Bove’s mentee in the beforetimes, flatly refused. In a scathing resignation letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, she noted that dismissing the case based on Adams’s promise to enact Trump’s immigration policies violates binding Supreme Court precedent, the New York Rules of Professional Conduct, and the Justice Department’s own policy manual. She also hinted at some extremely squirrelly behavior by Bove, who cut her office out of negotiations with Adams’s counsel and snatched the notes when a member of her staff dared to document what was going on.
“The court is unlikely to acquiesce in using the criminal process to control the behavior of a political figure,” Sassoon warned.
Bove’s response was positively histrionic.
“In no valid sense do you uphold the Constitution by disobeying direct orders implementing the policy of a duly elected President, and anyone romanticizing that behavior does a disservice to the nature of this work and the public’s perception of our efforts.”
The word “Orwellian” gets thrown around a lot these days, but it’s hard to convey just how wrong this is without the crutch of clichés. Under the guise of rooting out political weaponization at the D.O.J., Bove demands that a federal prosecutor dismiss a case for overtly political reasons, against both her conscience and the law. And when she protests that this is not how we do things here, he insists that it was ever thus.
It’s a gross betrayal of the ideals Bove once espoused, and a knife in the ribs of the office he spent his career in. “Emil Bove’s petulant screed demands that federal prosecutors swear loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the nation,” says White, who cut his teeth as a public-corruption prosecutor in the Central District of California. “Worse, he imposes a demeaning loyalty test: federal prosecutors must proclaim that an obviously corrupt quid pro quo is legitimate. Bove demands lies, not to persuade anyone, but to test mindless loyalty.” Bove did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.
At least seven lawyers resigned rather than put their names on the request to dismiss the Adams case. Eventually, a senior lawyer at the D.O.J.’s Public Integrity Section agreed to do it, reportedly to spare his younger colleagues. On Friday, Judge Ho appointed a Republican former solicitor general, Paul Clement, to advise the court on the legal issues Bove has created.
In the meantime, Bove is simply keeping the seat warm for Blanche, as his nomination to be deputy attorney general works its way through the Senate. In short order, all three of the top lawyers at the Justice Department, along with the solicitor general, will be Donald Trump’s personal attorneys. They intend to turn America’s law enforcement into muscle for their client, and they’ll burn the building to the ground if anyone suggests it was ever different.
Liz Dye is a writer living in Baltimore. She hosts the Law and Chaos podcast and newsletter and appears regularly on the Legal Eagle YouTube channel
