Emil Bove Is Everything Trump Wants In a Federal Judge

At this juncture in President Donald Trump’s second term, there is no better illustration of his contempt for the notion of an independent judiciary than his nomination of Emil Bove to a federal appeals court judgeship. As a reward for his previous service as Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, Trump at first appointed Bove to senior positions at the Department of Justice; now, as a reward for his continued loyalty to Trump’s agenda within the DOJ, Trump wants to promote Bove to a vacancy on the Third Circuit.

In a functioning democracy, a lawyer like Emil Bove would be enjoying a comfortable life as a relatively anonymous white-collar defense lawyer who bills his time at $1,000 per hour and posts mediocre totals in embarrassing online CrossFit competitions. In the United States, Bove is, at worst, a toss-up to get confirmed to a position in which he’ll spend the next four decades deciding which people get civil rights (his friends) and which people do not (anyone else).

As the Senate Judiciary Committee prepares for Bove’s confirmation hearing on Wednesday, a new whistleblower complaint reveals just how seriously Bove takes his continuing obligation to polish Trump’s boots with his tongue on command. Erez Reuveni, a former career Justice Department lawyer, has alleged that in March, Bove told Reuveni and his colleagues to prepare for the possibility that federal courts would block Trump’s plans to summarily disappear detained immigrants to overseas gulags—and that, if courts indeed issued such an order, the Trump administration might respond by simply telling them to fuck off. 

I am not editorializing here. “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such order,” Reuveni wrote in his complaint, which The New York Times published Tuesday. Reuveni says that hearing a senior Justice Department official casually suggest that the government “blatantly ignore court orders” left him in “disbelief,” and that the flurry of “awkward, nervous glances” around the room suggested that he was not the only one.

Under normal circumstances, an aspiring federal judge’s interest in telling an actual federal judge to go fuck himself would torpedo the nomination overnight. Senators of both parties would express grave concerns about confirming someone with so little respect for separation-of-powers principles. The nominee would issue a terse statement withdrawing from consideration to “spend more time with their family” or whatever, and the president would pivot to one of a dozen other ambitious, already-vetted lawyers who were disappointed that they didn’t get the initial nod, and are thrilled to be back in the mix.

None of this is going to happen here, though, because for Trump, an unblemished record of obedience is the only qualification that matters for anyone who aspires to sit on the federal bench. In his mind, the substance of Reuveni’s complaint does not suggest that Bove is manifestly unfit for the job. It shows that if Bove is confirmed, he will do the job exactly as Trump expects. 

Reuveni goes on to detail more ways in which he says the Trump administration treated court orders as suggestions it was free to ignore. He says that Trump’s deputy assistant attorney general, Drew Ensign, lied to Judge James Boasberg about whether the government had imminent plans to remove detainees from the country, since Ensign had been present for a meeting the day before in which Bove made clear that planes would be taking off “no matter what.” He says that after Boasberg issued an order that stopped flights from taking off—and that required any planes in the air to return to the U.S. immediately—Bove stalled, and eventually told the Department of Homeland Security to go ahead and deplane the detainees on flights that had reached El Salvador overnight. 

In other words, according to Reuveni, the decision to violate Boasberg’s order came not from some freelancing DHS goon, but directly from the guy whom Trump now wants to put on the Third Circuit.

After that, Reuveni says it did not take long for the powers that be to tire of his presence. In late March, Ensign allegedly called Reuveni and told him to stop sending so many annoying emails memorializing his concerns about the government’s habit of flouting deportation-related court orders. A few days later, Reuveni says that Yaakov Roth, Trump’s principal deputy assistant attorney general, called to relay that Bove was very upset with Reuveni, and told him to communicate only by phone going forward. Generally speaking, irate senior officials ordering subordinates not to put anything in writing anymore is a good sign that whatever is going on is not entirely on the up-and-up.

Finally, Reuveni says, the Justice Department decided he was more trouble than he was worth: In April, he was fired after refusing to sign a brief asserting without evidence that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man whom the Trump administration illegally shipped to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, had been a deportable “terrorist” all along. Around the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly reiterated the solemn obligation of all Justice Department lawyers to “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States,” which, in her view, apparently includes dutifully lying through one’s teeth when ordered to do so.

During the confirmation hearings for the first batch of Trump nominees this month, the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could barely be bothered to participate, let alone ask hard questions of the array of election skeptics and culture-war weirdos seated before them. Perhaps the prospect of handing a life-tenured judgeship to the president’s glorified errand boy will persuade Democrats that this time, they would be well advised to show up.