Free Republic

The forceful approach that Emil Bove III has taken toward the Southern District of New York underscores his own fraught relationship with the office that gave him the expertise to do so.Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general, stood stone-faced and alone at the prosecution table inside the federal courthouse in Manhattan last week to do a job his onetime colleagues in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York would not. Mr. Bove, who runs the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department under President Trump, was there to seek the dismissal of corruption charges against...

Federal judges have almost no ability under the law to refuse a government request to drop criminal charges. The corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York may be the exception.On Thursday, Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than obey an order to seek dismissal of the charges against the mayor. The directive was issued by Emil Bove III, the acting No. 2 official in President Trump’s Justice Department and his former criminal lawyer.Mr. Bove wrote that the demand had nothing to do with the strength of the evidence against the mayor or legal theories in...

In its first 24 hours, the new Trump administration has reached into critical U.S. attorney’s offices to quickly appoint new interim leaders, signaling a break from past practice that reflects the importance of frontline prosecutors to the administration’s plans.In three of the most important federal prosecutors’ offices — two in New York City and one in Washington — new acting leaders have been announced. Two of the picks are respected longtime prosecutors; the third is a Trump loyalist who had pushed for the release of Jan. 6 defendants.The new acting head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan is Danielle...

A book by a former top federal prosecutor offers new details about how the Justice Department under President Trump sought to use the US attorney’s office in Manhattan to support Trump politically and pursue his critics — even pushing the office to open a criminal investigation of former secretary of state John Kerry. The prosecutor, Geoffrey S. Berman, was the US attorney for the Southern District of New York for 2 1/2 years until June 2020, when Trump fired him after he refused a request to resign by then-Attorney General William Barr, who sought to replace him with an administration...

Attorney General William P. Barr on Friday night abruptly tried to fire the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, who has investigated several of President Trump’s closest associates, but Mr. Berman said he would not leave.