Commentary
President Donald Trump is reportedly considering naming Emil Bove, a personal attorney and enforcer, as a judge on a circuit court of appeals – just one step below the Supreme Court. Bove has been described by the New York Times as “the main enforcer of President Trump’s demands for retribution and unimpeded control of federal law enforcement.” Making Bove a federal judge would be a major threat to the rule of law, perhaps the strongest sign yet of Trump’s contempt for the federal courts’ role as a constitutional check on his abuses of power.
Before Trump returned to office this year, Bove served as one of his criminal defense lawyers. When it became clear that he and other Trump attorneys would be granted top positions in the administration, hard-right judicial activist Mike Davis declared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that Bove and others would be “savages” in the Justice Department, not “FedSoc cucks turning the other cheek.”
Bove hasn’t disappointed the MAGA hardliners. Since taking a top Justice Department position, Bove oversaw a purge of Justice Department and FBI officials who had been involved in investigating and prosecuting people who took part in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Among other things, Bove has:
- “ordered the firing of all prosecutors who had been hired on a probationary basis to work on Jan. 6-related cases” and “told the top federal prosecutors in each state to compile a list of all prosecutors and FBI agents involved in the Jan. 6 probe,” as Reuters reported;
- fired more than a half-dozen FBI executives, declaring that the FBI had “actively participated in what the president appropriately described as a ‘grave national injustice’ that has been perpetrated upon the American people,” according to AP.
- ordered acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll “to provide the names of all FBI staff who worked on investigations related the January 6, 2021 insurrection” and “warned that ‘additional personnel actions’ could follow,” according to a press release from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats.
Rep. Jamie Raskin called the targeting of Jan. 6 prosecutors and FBI agents a "repulsive affront to the rule of law."
Sen. Adam Schiff criticized Bove’s purge, saying the prosecutors were fired not for corruption or misconduct but “for failing what is, in effect, a loyalty test.” Schiff wrote, “The lawbreakers get pardoned. And the brave FBI agents who tracked down these violent miscreants, these agents get punished. They get fired. They get purged.”
In another sign that Bove is more than willing to sacrifice the rule of law to advance Trump’s agenda, Bove ordered deputy attorney general Danielle Sassoon to dismiss the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in February. The move was widely seen, even by some conservatives, as a corrupt quid pro quo to secure Adams’ cooperation to Trump administration anti-immigrant policies.
- Sassoon, a conservative Republican, wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi saying that Bove's request to drop charges in return for assistance in enforcing federal immigration laws would betray Bondi's own words that she "will not tolerate abuses of the criminal justice process, coercive behavior, or other forms of misconduct.” Sassoon, the lead prosecutor, and five members of the Justice Department’s public integrity unit resigned rather than comply with Bove’s demands.
- “This isn’t just obvious and blatant corruption,” wrote The New Republic’s Malcolm Ferguson. “It’s also a sign that the Justice Department has fully transformed into nothing more than a political tool for the president.”
- The editors of the conservative National Review called Bove’s rationale “incoherent.” The editors of the conservative Free Beacon noted that Bove conceded that his decision had nothing to do with “the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based.” They wrote that Bove’s effort to dismiss the case in a way that allowed him to bring charges again was a way of creative political leverage with Adams, making it clear that the decision was a “political deal.”
- Conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Feb. 28 edition of his newsletter, “The way AG Bondi and her deranged deputy, Emil Bove, bungled the Adams case and their desire to weaponize the DOJ to punish Trump’s enemies, reflects the degenerate reactionism of this era.”
- Bove told the judge reviewing DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case that there was no quid pro quo involved, but that even if there were, there was no reason for the judge not to go along with the DOJ’s request. The judge ended up dismissing the case with prejudice, meaning that DOJ could not reopen the case without additional evidence.
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and other Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee signed a complaint against Bove with the New York State bar, writing that “Mr. Bove’s conduct not only speaks to his fitness as a lawyer; his activities are part of a broader course of conduct by President Trump and his allies to undermine the traditional independence of Department of Justice’s investigations and prosecutions and the rule of law.” Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Richard Blumenthal also filed complaints with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility.
Before going into private practice and becoming Trump’s criminal defense attorney, Bove worked at the U.S. attorney’s office in Southern Manhattan, where he reportedly had a reputation as an abusive and bullying manager who alienated and demeaned prosecutors and who generated a complaint from a group of defense attorneys who “believed Bove had deployed questionable tactics, including threatening defendants with increasingly severe charges the lawyers believed he couldn’t prove,” Politico reported. Vanity Fair quoted one defense attorney who described Bove as “the perfect fucking hatchet man.”
Trump has been raging against judges and Supreme Court justices who require him to follow the law and Constitution. Bove being considered for a circuit court position makes it clear that, like his cabinet picks, Trump’s second-term judicial nominees will be more extreme than those in his first term, threatening the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law, and turning the courts into one more weapon for the would-be king to wield against his personal and political enemies.
