WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed former Trump lawyer Emil Bove 50-49 for a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge late Tuesday as Republicans dismissed whistleblower complaints about his conduct at the Justice Department.
Emil Bove, attorney for former US President Donald Trump, sits Manhattan criminal court during Trump's sentencing in the hush money case Jan. 10 in New York.
A former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was on Trump’s legal team during his New York hush money trial and defended Trump in the two federal criminal cases. He will serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Democrats vehemently opposed Bove’s nomination, citing his current position as a top Justice Department official and his role in the dismissal of the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. They also criticized his efforts to investigate department officials who were involved in the prosecutions of hundreds of Trump supporters who were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
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Bove accused FBI officials of “insubordination†for refusing to hand over the names of agents who investigated the attack and ordered the firing of a group of prosecutors involved in those Jan. 6 criminal cases.
Democrats also cited evidence from whistleblowers, a fired department lawyer who said last month that Bove suggested the Trump administration may need to ignore judicial commands — a claim that Bove denies — and new evidence from a whistleblower who did not go public. That whistleblower recently provided an audio recording of Bove that runs contrary to some of his testimony at his confirmation hearing last month, according to two people familiar with the recording.
The audio is from a private video conference call at the Department of Justice in February in which Bove, a top official at the department, discussed his handling of the dismissed case against Adams, according to transcribed quotes from the audio reviewed by The Associated Press.
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the whistleblower has not made the recording public. The whistleblower’s claims were first reported by the Washington Post.
None of that evidence has so far been enough to sway Senate Republicans — all but two of them voted to confirm Bove as GOP senators have deferred to Trump on virtually all of his picks.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that Bove's confirmation is a “dark day†and that Republicans are only supporting Bove because of his loyalty to the president.
“It's unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice,†Schumer said.
Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted against Bove's confirmation. “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench,†Murkowski said Tuesday.
At his confirmation hearing last month, Bove addressed criticism of his tenure head-on, telling lawmakers he understands some of his decisions “have generated controversy.†But Bove said he has been inaccurately portrayed as Trump’s “henchman†and “enforcer†at the department.
Senators at the Judiciary Committee hearing asked Bove about the February 14 call with lawyers in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which had received significant public attention because of his unusual directive that the attorneys had an hour to decide among themselves who would agree to file on the department’s behalf the motion to dismiss the case against Adams.
The call was convened amid significant upheaval in the department as prosecutors in New York who’d handled the matter, as well as some in Washington, resigned rather than agree to dispense with the case.
According to the transcript of the February call, Bove remarked near the outset that interim Manhattan U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon “resigned about ten minutes before we were going to put her on leave pending an investigation.†But when asked at the hearing whether he had opened the meeting by emphasizing that Sassoon and another prosecutor had refused to follow orders and that Sassoon was going to be reassigned before she resigned, Bove answered with a simple, “No.â€
At another moment, Bove said he did not recall saying words that the transcript of the call reflects him as having said — that whoever signed the motion to dismiss the Adams case would emerge as leaders of the section.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Tuesday he believes Bove will be a “diligent, capable and fair jurist.â€
He said his staff tried to investigate the claims but that lawyers for the whistleblowers would not give them all of the materials they asked for. The “vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations and abuse directed at Mr. Bove†have “crossed the line,†Grassley said.
The first whistleblower complaint against Bove came from a former Justice Department lawyer who was fired in April after conceding in court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who had been living in Maryland, was mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison.
That lawyer, Erez Reuveni, described efforts by top Justice Department officials in the weeks before his firing to stonewall and mislead judges to carry out deportations championed by the White House.
Reuveni described a Justice Department meeting in March concerning Trump’s plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act over what the president claimed was an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Reuveni said Bove raised the possibility that a court might block the deportations before they could happen. Reuveni claims Bove used a profanity in saying the department would need to consider telling the courts what to do and “ignore any such order,†Reuveni’s lawyers said in the filing.
Bove said he has “no recollection of saying anything of that kind.â€
Trump vs. the courts: Presidential attacks open new front in long battle
Trump vs. the courts: Presidential attacks open new front in long battle
On March 15, three planes left the U.S., bound for a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration justified the deportation by saying most of the men on the planes were members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal gang.
Lawyers for some of the men say their clients were misidentified as gang members, in many cases, unrelated to TdA. In one case, a lawyer says the tattoo may have been for the popular Real Madrid soccer team.
None of the men had the opportunity to argue against the administration's assertion in court because they were deported under the Alien Enemies Act, which President Donald Trump had . The act gives the government the from hostile nations during wartime or an invasion, without due process.
The U.S. Venezuela or TdA, nor is the gang a country—one of several reasons federal judge James Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around on March 15. Boasberg concluded that the administration to make the deportations.
Despite the order, the planes landed, and the men were taken into the custody of the Salvadoran prison, complete with by Trump . The episode set off a legal and political firestorm over whether the administration had , and what would come next if so.
"If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration's assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process," Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, "the president is asserting dictatorial power and 'constitutional crisis' doesn't capture the gravity of the situation."
There are about 1,700 federal judges in the U.S., and all are appointed by presidents and confirmed by the U.S. Senate—not elected, explains. Trump and his allies have argued that it is, in effect, judge, from any district, can overrule the will of the president on a national level.
Skepticism of the federal courts on these grounds is or conservative preoccupation: In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that struck down Roe v. Wade, prominent Democrats also . A few even for .
More broadly, presidents have long jockeyed with the courts over power. Franklin D. Roosevelt's to up to 15 justices to add members sympathetic to his New Deal programs is just one memorable example.
However, Trump's attacks on the judiciary are unprecedented in some ways, especially the extent to which they've been directed at individual judges.
Trump has called Boasberg—who was —"a radical left lunatic" and called for his impeachment. Almost immediately, some Republican House members against Boasberg. The effort is unlikely to go far, as it would to convict. Still, some experts see it as an escalation in Trump's . To date, no federal judge "because of dissatisfaction with his or her rulings," a former judge told NPR.
The personalized and agitated tenor around judges has . That was true over the deportation flights.
Congressional Republicans are pursuing legislation that would altogether. On Thursday, Trump also called for the Supreme Court to issue national injunctions.
If either came to fruition, it would massively untether the administration from judicial checks. According to The Washington Post, there are where a federal judge paused or reversed a Trump administration policy. That means about once every four days since Trump's inauguration, that the administration likely broke the law.
Trump officials have , and on March 19 "border czar" Tom Homan said that he will before using it for more deportation flights. But at the same time, Boasberg has ruled that administration lawyers about the deportations or gave "woefully insufficient" answers.
If the Trump administration were to simply begin ignoring the courts, it's unclear what could be done to stop it. —an agency under the Department of Justice. As Vox's Ian Millhiser wrote this week: Trump could simply tell the U.S. attorney general to instruct marshals not to enforce court orders against his administration.
While Congress could impeach Trump if he blatantly ignores the law, that outcome is unlikely for the same partisan reasons that will probably save Boasberg from removal.
Still, some argue that the point isn't necessarily defiance—it may be just as much about the spectacle of defiance and punishment. In a post this week, historian Timothy Snyder more for public consumption than to achieve any discrete immigration enforcement goal.
"They are deliberately associating the law itself with people, the deportees, who they expect to be unpopular," Snyder wrote. "In this way they hope to get popular opinion on their side as they ignore a court order. But if they succeed in making an exception once, it becomes the rule."
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