Investigating and arresting the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot: The New York office of the U.S. Attorney’s office under Emil Bove

After a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Emil Bove led efforts by federal prosecutors in Manhattan to help the FBI aggressively investigate, identify and arrest rioters from the New York region.

Bove left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan about a year after the Capitol riot. Todd Blanche has been nominated to be the deputy attorney general in the Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi, and he joined Trump’s legal defense team.

The disconnect between Bove’s aggressive stance to hold rioters accountable for the Jan. 6 assault and his current hostility around the investigation has troubled some former colleagues.

At no point did I ever hear anyone express concern regarding the investigations or the arrests that we were making, said Christopher O’Leary, a counterterrorism official in the FBI’s New York field office. “We never heard any pushback from him or anybody in his office.”

The Department of Justice didn’t immediately respond to questions about the disconnect between Bove’s role in New York and his actions since entering the Department of Justice.

When the Jan. 6 attack happened, Bove was the co-chief of the terrorism and international narcotics unit at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

“I was impressed with him as an attorney, as a trustworthy partner, and as a committed professional to our counterterrorism cases, and I always had a good working relationship with him.”

“I’m really surprised and disappointed by his actions, how he’s pursuing FBI agents and employees who were conducting investigations in the same manner that they would have conducted any investigation,” O’Leary said.

He has transferred several top career attorneys with decades of experience to a new office that handles immigration enforcement, effectively pushing them out of the department.

He also had to dismiss many Capitol riot prosecutors in Washington, D.C. The January prosecutors were brought in to handle the more than 1,600 Capitol riot prosecutions, which was one of the largest investigations in Justice Department history.

On the FBI front, he has pushed out eight senior bureau officials, according to the memo, and demanded the names of FBI agents who worked Jan. 6 cases, touching off fears of possible mass firings at the bureau.

“No FBI employee who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner with respect to January 6 investigations is at risk of termination or other penalties,” Bove wrote in an email last week addressed to all FBI employees.

Those who acted with corrupt or partisan intent, who blatantly violated orders from Department leadership, or who exercised discretion in weaponizing the FBI are the only individuals who should be concerned.

The FBI and acting director Brian Driscoll gave the Justice Department a list of bureau employees. Driscoll has told the FBI workforce that he is one of the agents who worked Jan. 6 cases, according to an email he sent.

In at least one instance, Bove and Driscoll worked on the same Jan. 6 case: the arrest of Samuel Fisher in Manhattan, according to the former prosecutor who worked with Bove in New York. Driscoll participated in the arrest of Fisher, who was ultimately sentenced to 120 days in prison for his activities at the U.S. Capitol. Bove was up late that night reviewing the legal paperwork to support the FBI, the former prosecutor said.

The former prosecutor said that there should be a list of attorneys who worked on Jan 6. The cases were collected in the same manner as the FBI agents’, “Emil’s name would surely be on that list as well.”

Three senior federal prosecutors resigned Thursday in connection with the department’s decision to drop the criminal corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, resigned, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said. Her decision came three days after Justice Department leadership instructed her to drop the criminal corruption case against Adams.

Bove stated that “you lost sight of the oath that you took when you started at the Department of Justice because you suggested to retain a discretion to interpret the Constitution in a manner that was incompatible with the policies of a President and a Senate-confirmed Attorney General.”

One of the three assistant U.S. attorneys placed on leave is Hagan Scotten, a Bronze star winner and a graduate of Harvard Law School, who previously clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts.

Later Thursday, John Keller, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and Kevin Driscoll, the senior-most career Justice Department official leading the Criminal Division, also resigned after being asked to take over the Adams case, according to two sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

A Justice Department memo made public Monday called for federal charges against him to be shelved “without prejudice.” Adams has long said he’s innocent of any criminal wrongdoing.

His attorneys accused the US attorneys of leaking sensitive and privileged information to the media. The indictment filed last September in federal court in Manhattan alleged Adams used his official positions with New York City to leverage “illegal campaign contributions and luxury travel.”

A former senior Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, called the fallout from the Adams case, “the worst we’ve seen so far (from the new DOJ) and that’s a high bar.” The former official said the idea of dropping the Adams case in this way was “jaw dropping, shocking.”