A former federal prosecutor blasted president Donald Trump's former criminal defense attorney for acting as a "hatchet man" at the Department of Justice.
Emil Bove, the acting deputy attorney general, accused the FBI's acting director Brian Driscoll of refusing his order to release the names of investigators who worked on Jan. 6 cases as part of a department-wide purge of individuals deemed disloyal to the president, and he then moved to dismiss a corruption case against New York City mayor Eric Adams – who has emerged as a Trump ally.
"This has sent shockwaves through the Justice Department and the Southern District of New York community, to put it mildly," former prosecutor Mimi Rocah told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "Let's talk about the what, the how and the why, because I think there are really three parts to this. The what is the order from main justice to dismiss the case – highly unusual, but not totally, not never done. It's not that main justice never tells a U.S. attorney's office [to] drop a case, an indicted case – extremely unusual. It's everything after that, though, that really is what is so kind of shocking about this."
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"The how Emil Bove – and, no, it wasn't attorney general [Pam] Bondi who wrote this memo, or even deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who's not yet there, but Bondi is," continued Rocah, who previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. "It's Emil Bove, who has been the DOJ hatchet man. I mean, that is really been his role, and he seems to take some fanfare in it. He wrote a memo to the office that is to the U.S. attorney directing them, I've never seen anything like that – a memo, a public memo. It's such an heavy-handed exercise of power: 'I'm not just telling you to do this, I'm making it public so that if you are going to defy me, everyone will know and I'm going to lay out my reasons, my pretextual reasons.' I mean, that's the other thing. this memo is full of pretext. Everything in there is a made up excuse to try to make this look legitimate, and it is so obviously not legitimate – it is corrupt."
"I mean, that is really the only word for it, and that gets to the why – why are they doing this?" Rocah added. "Why are they ordering the Southern District to drop a case that a grand jury indicted, that the Southern District had indicated they were going to go back to the grand jury to add more, because they were uncovering more evidence. There's no hint that this is a weak case, and even if it is, there's a process for that, right? But Bove says in the memo, this isn't about the merits of the case. He's admittedly, he's openly admitting that he is telling them to drop it, not because of the merits of the case, but because of something else, and what's this something else? It's this political deal about immigration enforcement."
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