Trump’s feared DOJ enforcer has a secret: He, too, investigated Jan. 6
Emil Bove, the acting DOJ official behind a potential witch hunt against prosecutors and FBI agents who investigated the Capitol riot, worked on Jan. 6 cases himself
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.
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