Over the past several months, the Trump administration has launched some two dozen airstrikes in the Caribbean Sea against small boats suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, resulting in at least 83 deaths. The White House’s official X account usually posts a grainy, black-and-white clip of the action a few days later, because the only thing Trump loves more than ordering extrajudicial killings of criminal suspects is watching each one on a loop.
Using military force to bomb legally innocent people who are uninvolved in armed conflict is so obviously, preposterously unlawful that none other than the law professor John Yoo has argued that the administration appears to be engaged in “a broad, amorphous military campaign against the illegal drug trade” that “would violate American law and the Constitution.” Generally speaking, when the author of the Bush torture memos is comfortable publicly opining that you are violating international humanitarian law, you would be well-advised to consult with a better defense lawyer than whichever one is advising you at that particular moment.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that over the summer, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel drafted an opinion outlining a legal justification for the airstrikes, hoping to protect participants from future criminal liability. But on Monday, NPR revealed that the initiative had an enthusiastic cheerleader at an even earlier stage in its development: Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney who briefly became his fixer within the Justice Department, and then, in July, a life-tenured federal appeals court judge on the Third Circuit.
According to NPR, back in February, Bove told a roomful of federal prosecutors that the White House no longer intended to go to the trouble of intercepting vessels at sea, arresting crew members, seizing drugs, collecting evidence, and so on. Instead, Bove suggested that the administration wanted to simplify the process considerably, and “just sink the boats.” Reuters has since reported that Bove made similar comments on at least two other occasions before that February meeting, at which witnesses described him as “belligerent,” “macho,” and titillated by the prospect of prosecutors getting “unleashed.”
In fairness to Bove—not a courtesy this administration has been extending to the people on the boats, but whatever—some attendees said that in the moment, it was unclear whether Bove was merely referring to the practice of sinking boats after the Coast Guard takes the crew into custody, or whether he was explicitly pushing to bomb the boats without any warning, let alone process. But another attendee told NPR that when news of the airstrikes broke in September, Bove’s language from seven months earlier no longer seemed quite as ambiguous.
“It just didn’t seem reasonable until they started blowing boats up, and then holy shit, does this all go together?” the person said. “Now that you look back on it, I think you can infer he probably meant, Just sink the boats with the people on them.”
The account published by NPR is consistent with what else we know about Bove’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he took a shoot-first-ask-questions-last approach to just about any issue that came across his desk. According to multiple whistleblowers, in March, Bove suggested to subordinates that they might need to say “fuck you” to federal judges who ordered the White House to stop disappearing noncitizens to overseas megaprisons. Still other whistleblowers have alleged that at Bove’s confirmation hearings, he lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee about his role in the dismissal of federal criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—a choice that prompted a half-dozen prosecutors to resign in protest.
For my money, the most remarkable detail of this story is how unserious a person it shows Bove to be. Based on the timeline, his “just sink the boats” comments were not based on a carefully researched, thoroughly vetted opinion about the legality of using military airstrikes to murder civilians in international waters. Bove was just another sweaty, ladder-climbing try-hard who wormed his way into Trump’s inner circle, jumped at the chance to live out a vigilante justice fantasy, and trusted that actual lawyers would take care of the details for him.
Bove’s alleged involvement in the airstrikes gives Democrats even more fodder for impeaching and removing him from office next time they control the House and Senate. In my view, people whose primary takeaway from A Few Good Men was that Colonel Jessep got a raw deal do not belong in public service, let alone in a position in which they answer only to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, though, the reason these episodes are so troubling is what they reveal about how Emil Bove will do the job of being a federal judge, for however long he holds it. In each case, he has demonstrated a casual, often contemptuous view of his legal obligations; in each case, he has implicitly or explicitly taken the position that by virtue of being in a position of power, the law is whatever he imagines it to be. If you are a person whom Trump likes, and your case in the Third Circuit lands before Judge Bove someday, congratulations, you can count on your friend to take care of you. If you are anyone else, you are on your own.
