When President Trump pardoned the former leader of Honduras this week, he erased the crowning achievement of years of work by one of his own former criminal defense lawyers and top Justice Department officials, Emil Bove III.
Mr. Bove, a firm believer in the prerogatives of executive power, became known for defending Mr. Trump against several prosecutions, and his profile rose further when, at the Justice Department, he oversaw the firing of dozens of prosecutors and F.B.I. agents Mr. Trump perceived as enemies. In May, the president nominated him as a federal appeals court judge and the Senate confirmed him in July.
But before that, Mr. Bove was a hard-charging prosecutor in Manhattan bent on convicting members of a Honduran drug-trafficking conspiracy.
From 2015 to when he left the job in 2021, Mr. Bove helped lead the investigation that identified Honduras as a key conduit for cocaine shipments into the United States. The inquiry revealed the violence that had cleared a pathway for the drugs through Honduras, as the country’s officials mowed down anyone who sought to thwart them. And it ultimately led to the conviction in 2024 of President Juan Orlando Hernández, who prosecutors said had been at the center of the conspiracy.
Last week, with little warning, Mr. Trump said that he would pardon Mr. Hernández, and the ex-president was freed on Monday night. It was a potent illustration of how the long-held priorities of even Mr. Trump’s most loyal lieutenants are captive to the president’s own imperatives.
The Honduran cases began with the cooperation of two drug-trafficking brothers who led an organization called Los Cachiros and said that they had caused the murder of 78 people. Over the following years, Mr. Bove and other prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York worked their way up from midlevel dealers to high-ranking officials to the president’s brother and then to the president, whom the office convicted of conspiring to import more than 400 tons of cocaine in the United States.
Mr. Bove, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, was one of the authors of a memo laying out the evidence against Mr. Hernández, the road map prosecutors used to navigate the case.
He delivered the closing argument at the 2019 trial of Mr. Hernández’s brother, Tony Hernández, illustrating the impact of both brothers’ crimes in intimate terms. Tony Hernández, he told jurors, had helped to import “almost two hundred thousand kilos of cocaine into the United States.”
“There are eight thousand individual doses of cocaine in a kilo,” he told the jury. “And there is real misery in that number. This is not Netflix. This isn’t a movie. Every single dose could leave a parent wondering where their child is.”
Asked on Tuesday for comment on the pardon, Mr. Bove said, “I am proud to have previously represented and served President Trump, and I completely trust and respect his judgment in exercising the pardon power, which the Constitution vests in him alone by virtue of his mandate from the American people.”
He said he had made no attempt to intercede after Mr. Trump announced his plan to pardon Mr. Hernández, and that he took no issue with it.
Mr. Bove worked on a variety of major cases as a prosecutor, including narcotics trafficking prosecutions involving Venezuela. Those implicated nephews of Venezuela’s first lady who were convicted on drug charges in 2015. Mr. Bove also supervised the indictment of the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and members of his military.
The nephews were released from prison in 2022 by the Biden administration in exchange for seven Americans who had been imprisoned in Venezuela.
Mr. Bove also focused on counterintelligence prosecutions like that of Ali Kourani, a Hezbollah operative, and counterterrorism work, including the prosecution of Sayfullo Saipov, who was convicted of killing eight people with a truck in Manhattan.
He has a difficult relationship with his former office. His departure from the Southern District was complicated by complaints from defense lawyers about his aggression and from some prosecutors about his management style. His tenure was marred by the collapse of a case that he had overseen, in which the prosecutors he supervised were accused of delaying the disclosure of evidence to the defense, a serious ethical lapse.
He alienated many of his fellow office alumni this year by pushing the Southern District’s leaders to abandon a criminal case against New York City’s mayor, and then formally seeking the dismissal himself after several prosecutors defiantly resigned.
Still, his response to the Hernández pardon was extraordinary, given the years that he devoted to the investigation, and its importance to the current leadership of the Manhattan office. The criminal division leader, Amanda Houle, worked closely with Mr. Bove on many cases that resulted from the investigation, and the office’s top deputy, Sean Buckley, supervised Mr. Bove’s unit for several years.
On Tuesday, Jay Clayton, the current U.S. attorney in Manhattan, was asked by an audience member at a Manhattan legal conference what message other countries should take from Mr. Trump’s recent pardons, including that of Mr. Hernández. A moderator rephrased the question and Mr. Clayton did not mention the pardon in his response.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment on the pardon or on Mr. Bove’s role in the Honduras cases.
Defense lawyers who represented people involved in the investigation remembered Mr. Bove as having impressive command of the details, pushing defendants who would become cooperating witnesses to reveal all they knew.
Scott Kalisch, who represented a defendant-turned-witness, Víctor Hugo Díaz Morales or “El Rojo,” remembered many meetings with the former prosecutor in a small room at the U.S. attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan.
“My client would say something and Bove would say it was not complete,” Mr. Kalisch recalled. “He would look at his computer and he’d say, ‘You’re leaving stuff out. You need to become a better witness, so think hard.’ My client would think about it. Sometimes we’d cut off the meetings and meet the next day and my client would remember what he hadn’t included.”
The inquiry was enormously complex and prosecuting it required mapping social networks and loose professional organizations across several different Latin American countries, defense lawyers associated with the case said. In 2010, federal drug enforcement agents began investigating air trafficking out of Colombia and Venezuela. They soon realized that Honduras was a key segment in the pipeline.
An investigation that vast is a universe unto itself, Mr. Kalisch said, and Mr. Bove commanded it. He drove cases aggressively, leveraging the threat of heavy prison sentences and pushing for trials of defendants who refused to cooperate. The inquiry focused not just on drug traffickers but also on politicians and police and military officials.
The politics of the cases were also complicated, given Mr. Hernández’s position. In appealing for a pardon, the ex-president said that he had been the victim of a political prosecution directed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris. But the Biden White House in fact slowed the case against the Honduran president, according to the two people with knowledge of the case, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely.
The prosecution of Tony Hernández elicited excitement from Hondurans, who attended his 2019 trial daily and pushed for the prosecution of Tony’s brother, Juan Orlando, as evidence about his involvement emerged. Juan Orlando Hernández left the presidency in 2022. Only after he departed was he charged, extradited, tried and convicted. Enthusiastic Hondurans attended his trial, too.
By that time, Mr. Bove had left the Southern District. But he had made his mark on the Honduran cases. Little else he worked on compared to the scale of those prosecutions, or the viciousness of defendants in those cases, who often had killed or otherwise caused the deaths of dozens of people.
“Honduras has about as many people as New York City,” Mr. Bove said in his closing argument at Tony Hernández’s trial, adding: “And for almost 15 years the defendant ravaged his country to work with other men to send a tidal wave of cocaine to the United States. He showed zero regard for the people he harmed. Zero concern for those he placed at risk, including people here.”
Mr. Kalisch, the witness’s lawyer, said he had been stunned at the violence of the conspiracy. Mr. Bove had showed him a video of a man stabbed to death in a jail cell, and evidence of various other murders.
Interviewed days before Mr. Trump formally pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, Mr. Kalisch expressed disbelief that such a thing could happen, after the trials had shown how the ex-president had poisoned Honduras.
“It was a totally corrupt country, starting from the president on down,” he said. “I just don’t see how Trump can pardon the president. I just don’t see it. I can’t believe it.”
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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