When acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the FBI to provide the names of any agents and employees who participated in the Jan. 6 investigation, he should have started by acknowledging his own role.
Before he was one of President Donald Trump’s lawyers in the porn star hush-money trial, Bove was the co-chief counter-terrorism prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. He regularly attended weekly executive meetings of the FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), where cases against Jan. 6 rioters at the Capitol were discussed.
While the main Jan. 6 case was run out of the FBI’s Washington, D.C. field office and the U.S. Attorney’s office there, the SDNY prosecutors and the New York JTTF were directly involved in tracking down suspects in their area of operations. That means Bove was intimately aware of those investigations, according to multiple knowledgeable people who attended the meetings.
“He was certainly knowledgeable of everything going on,” recalls Chris O’Leary, a now-retired FBI agent and former member of New York’s JTTF. “And he easily could have spoken up and protested back then, but he didn’t, because he didn’t see anything wrong. And he’s hypocritical doing it now.”
The question of whether to provide the names fell to acting FBI Director Brian “Drizz” Driscoll and acting Assistant Director Robert Kissane. Both men were members of the New York JTTF during the Jan. 6 investigations and attended the same meetings as Bove. He even socialized with them and the rest of the task force, the Daily Beast was told.
“So [Bove] knows Brian Driscoll…and Rob Kissane extremely well,” O’Leary noted.
Anybody who knows them has to understand that a title and an interlude in headquarters were not going to make them anything other than working agents of the most stand-up, honorable kind, multiple fellow investigators said.
Driscoll demonstrated that when Bove asked for the names. Faced with the choice of whether to go along or not, Driscoll was someone who had not yet reached retirement age and risked finding himself with neither a job nor a pension.
He refused.
“We understand that this request encompasses thousands of employees across the country who have supported these investigative efforts,” Driscoll said in a bureau-wide email. “I am one of those employees.”
Before the question of the list of names even got to Driscoll and Kissane, Bove could have taken a stand. He could have then done whatever he was able to do to shield them as Driscoll and Kissane have now been doing for their fellow agents.
Instead, Bove issued a memo on Wednesday accusing Driscoll and Kissane of “insubordination” when they “refused to comply” with an effort to identify “the core team” in the Jan. 6 investigations. Bove said their lack of cooperation had caused him to send out a bureau-wide survey asking all FBI agents and employees to specify what they had or had not done in the Jan. 6 investigation. Here again, he should have begun with himself.
The Department of Justice did not respond to the Daily Beast’s requests for comment on Bove’s role at the time. But it is clear that if Bove was not at the core of the Jan. 6 investigations, he certainly was on the team. The Jan. 6 cases handled by the JTTF in New York included Samuel Fisher, a misogynistic, self-styled online “dating coach” who admitted bringing an AR-15 rifle and a ghost handgun when he headed to Washington, D.C., to “stop the steal.”
“Get a firearm and go lol, its 1776 time dawg… need to stand up to the evils of this Government and remove them physically,” he posted during the days leading up to the riot.
Thankfully, he seems to have left the weapons behind when he entered the Capitol. The guns and 1,000 rounds of ammunition were recovered when he was arrested by the JTTF on the Upper East Side of Manhattan on Jan. 20, 2021. Driscoll and O’Leary were present.
Fisher was only charged with a misdemeanor in connection with Jan. 6 and was sentenced to four months, according to court docs. But he was also hit with gun charges in state court and got three and a half years. He was released in September.
Along with all the others convicted in connection with the Jan. 6 riot, he was pardoned on the federal charges by President Trump the day he returned to office. For those who think Fisher was a patriotic hostage who fell victim to a weaponized FBI, the court documents from the federal case report something he posted on Facebook after the Jan 6 riot.
“i was there… it was awesome… it was dangerous and violent… people died… but it was f---ing great if you ask me…” he wrote. “Seeing cops literally run was the coolest thing i’ve ever seen in my life.”
Now that Pam Bondi has been sworn in as the new attorney general, Todd Blanche—another of Trump’s criminal lawyers in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case—is expected to assume the position as No. 2 in the Department of Justice Bove has been holding in the interim. Bove is then expected to become Blanche’s top deputy. That will make Bove No. 3, but he will get there having abetted a shameful falsehood.
“The idea that there’s some politically motivated Deep State in the bureau is absurd,” O’Leary said. “We don’t stand around the water cooler, bulls----ing about politics. Nobody cares about any of that stuff. We care about cases and operations and arrests.”
He added, “And usually in a week like this, we’re talking about the Super Bowl, instead of people worrying about losing their jobs.”
