On paper, Emil Bove is one of the better qualified people that President-elect Donald Trump wants for his next administration. Unlike Matt Gaetz, who was briefly floated to be U.S. attorney general, Bove has actual prosecutorial experience, which will come in handy if he’s confirmed as the Justice Department’s third-most-senior official.
But during his last stint as a supervising prosecutor, Bove oversaw a case that was so mired by prosecutorial misconduct that a judge diagnosed it an “institutional failure.”
For just over two years, Bove was one of two chiefs of the terrorism and international narcotics unit in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, as Trump highlighted in a statement last month. It was there that Bove supervised a case involving alleged evasion of sanctions, which a federal judge slammed as “marred by repeated failures to disclose exculpatory evidence.”
The government so thoroughly botched its constitutional obligation to turn over evidence that prosecutors asked the court to vacate a jury verdict. The defendant, Ali Sadr, had been convicted on multiple counts of evading sanctions against Iran.
“The supervising Unit Chiefs appear to have offered little in the way of supervision,” wrote then-District Court Judge Alison Nathan, who has since been elevated to the federal appellate bench, in 2021. A few months earlier, the judge noted “insufficient supervision” as a significant factor in the “disclosure-related issues that plagued the prosecution in this case.”
Nathan ultimately found there were “grave derelictions of prosecutorial responsibility” and “systemic” prosecutorial misconduct in the case, although it did not rise to the level of intentional misconduct.
Less than a year after the blistering ruling, Bove left the Justice Department for private practice, and he joined Trump’s legal team soon after. Bove helped lead Trump’s defense in multiple cases, including the New York hush-money case — in which the former president was convicted on all counts earlier this year — and the two federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith, which the Department of Justice dismissed after Trump won the election. Along with Bove, Trump announced he wants to appoint another of his attorneys on the cases, Todd Blanche, to a top DOJ post.
Reached by email, Bove declined to answer The Intercept’s questions.
“I understand you’re going to take a shot at me, and I’m not going to waste time arguing with you about the mischaracterizations in your email,” he wrote. Bove did not reply to subsequent requests to identify the purported mischaracterizations.
Some experts were concerned about what Bove’s shortcomings as a supervisor in the Sadr case might suggest about his future at the top of the DOJ supervisory chain.
“If Bove can’t manage to properly supervise a handful of prosecutors in a single case,” said Ben Gershman, a law professor and expert on prosecutorial ethics, “what does this portend for the proper functioning of the Justice Department if Bove is called upon to supervise the many, many thousands of prosecutors in a huge, sprawling government agency?”
The fact that a federal judge called out Bove and his unit co-chief at all is notable.
Courts often go to great lengths to avoid chastising prosecutors when they violate the Brady doctrine — named for a U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires the government to turn over certain evidence to defendants. As a recent study of hundreds of Brady doctrine decisions found, it’s even rarer for a judge to single out an offending prosecutor by name.
“It is rare for a prosecutor — no less a supervising prosecutor — to be called on the carpet for Brady problems,” said law professor Adam M. Gershowitz, one of the study’s authors.
But Nathan was extremely disturbed by how Bove’s team behaved, which she framed as a stark outlier in her near decade on the bench.
“This serious dereliction requires a serious response,” she wrote in a September 2020 ruling, after all charges against Sadr were dismissed.
“This serious dereliction requires a serious response.”
Nathan demanded detailed sworn affidavits from Bove and every other prosecutor involved. Given the “exceptional public interest” of airing out what happened, she later unsealed these materials, including text messages in which Bove wrote that one of his supervisees had told defense attorneys a “flat lie” about when the team discovered their error. (Bove later wrote in his affidavit, “In hindsight, I believe that is an unfair characterization.”)
The records show that the unit overlooked a document that undercut the case against Sadr until the middle of trial. Once the document came to light, rather than admit the error to the defense and the court, prosecutors working under Bove discussed how to “bury” it in a bundle of documents without flagging it as a new disclosure. (Bove himself was not part of these discussions, the court found, and only became aware of the undisclosed document after his team produced it.)
After Sadr’s defense attorneys caught on, the team would not cop to the violation, even as Bove texted privately about its “gravity.”
Instead, one of the prosecutors filed a letter to the court that misrepresented their actions. In court, Bove apologized but largely defended the team’s conduct, including the misleading letter, in statements that the judge deemed contradictory fingerpointing.
“The prosecutors — including the Unit Chiefs — dug themselves in deeper rather than squarely take responsibility for their past missteps,” Nathan wrote. She found that although Bove and his co-chief did not direct their team to mislead her, that did not absolve them entirely. “What the Unit Chiefs plainly did not do, however, was provide sufficient supervision to ensure the accuracy of the response to the Court,” she wrote.
“Judge Nathan’s observations may offer insight into how Mr. Bove tends to manage a prosecutorial team and that might be cause for concern,” said law professor Daniel Medwed.
Nathan found that the prosecutors’ pervasive errors in the case required “systemic solutions” from Justice Department leadership. She also urged the DOJ to refer the case to its Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates misconduct claims against federal prosecutors.
OPR is notoriously opaque. Even when it determines prosecutors committed misconduct, the office typically publishes only an anonymized summary of its findings.
One such summary, published in 2023 does not name Bove or any other prosecutor but closely matches the details in the Sadr case, including the court’s findings and the circumstances behind a misleading court filing. It suggests OPR found no misconduct but that “the conduct of members of the trial team was flawed.”
