Senate panel to vote on federal judge nomination for Emil Bove, who defended Trump

An attorney tied to some of the most aggressive legal moves by the Justice Department this year is in line to get a promotion soon, if President Trump gets his way.

A Senate panel is preparing to vote Thursday to advance a life-tenured judicial nomination for Emil Bove. Bove, 44, previously served as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and defended Trump in a pair of criminal cases filed by the Justice Department.

The White House says Bove is an ideal nominee for an open seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Trump has posted on social media that Bove would “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

But Bove’s record in and outside the Justice Department has fueled opposition from 900 former DOJ lawyers who identify with both major political parties and a group of more than 75 retired state and federal court judges who fear his intense loyalty to the president would carry over onto the bench.

“The rule of law is really only as strong as the institutions that enforce it and then interpret it — chief among them the DOJ and the judiciary,” said Stacey Young, who leads Justice Connection, a group that helps Justice Department lawyers find ethics and legal advice. “And it would be disgraceful to elevate someone who’s degraded one of those institutions to a lifetime seat on the other.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is charging full steam ahead on the nomination, despite requests from Democrats to investigate claims made against Bove by a department whistleblower.

Erez Reuveni, a longtime DOJ lawyer fired this year for acknowledging the administration had mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, recently came forward with allegations that Bove told government lawyers they might need to disobey court orders. Reuveni produced text messages, emails and other documents to back up his claims.

At his confirmation hearing, Bove told lawmakers he was not an “enforcer” or a “henchman” for the president. He denied that he had ever told subordinates to violate a court order. But he said he did not recall telling DOJ lawyers in a meeting that they might have to tell judges “f*** you” if the courts tried to block the White House’s effort to roll out speedy deportations of migrants, as was alleged in the whistleblower complaint.

That’s a red flag for former federal prosecutor David Laufman, who said Bove has taken a “wrecking ball” to the Justice Department this year by firing career prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on cases involving Trump and the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The volume and quality of the evidence contradicting his failure to recall tells us everything we need to know about his contempt for the judiciary, his contempt for longstanding department norms,” Laufman said.

Laufman added: “Were he confirmed, we have every reason to believe that Mr. Bove would rubber stamp whatever the administration seeks to do and contribute to a majority ruling in favor of the administration with consequences for the entire country.”

But Grassley said in a letter to Judiciary Committee Democrats this week that he was unpersuaded by the whistleblower allegations.

“Following a comprehensive review of the additional documents that you published following the hearing and discussed in the media, I do not believe that they substantiate any misconduct by Mr. Bove,” Grassley wrote.

Grassley also has questioned why Reuveni’s complaint emerged on the eve of a confirmation hearing for Bove, raising the idea it might be a politically coordinated attack.

But Dana Gold, senior counsel at the Government Accountability Project, said she and other lawyers for Reuveni had been working for months, line by line, to navigate the whistleblower process and ethics considerations.

Of the timing, Gold said, “It had nothing to do with tanking Emil Bove’s nomination. It had to do with getting the truth out.”

Gold added: “We do think that the information is highly relevant to Emil Bove’s nomination, that’s clear. It’s really important in terms of how leadership within the Department of Justice has interpreted and asked career attorneys to pursue a political agenda over the rule of law.”

A DOJ spokesman called Bove “a highly qualified judicial nominee who has done incredible work at the Department of Justice to help protect civil rights, dismantle Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and Make America Safe Again.”

Michael Fragoso advanced scores of judicial nominations when he worked as a Republican Senate aide. Fragoso said all signs point to confirmation of Bove, along committee party lines.

“I don’t think Chairman Grassley would be calling the vote if he didn’t have the votes,” said Fragoso, who’s now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and an attorney at Torridon Law PLLC.