Bove, a 44-year-old lawyer who previously worked on Trump’s personal legal issues, spent the last six months at the Trump Justice Department serving as the acting deputy attorney general, a temporary position that did not require Senate confirmation. His tenure was brief but notorious. He showed no compunction about serving as Trump’s legal hatchet man, no matter the legal or ethical constraints. To that end, he played a central role in two of the Trump administration’s biggest scandals to the dismissal of corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the defiance of federal court orders in the Alien Enemies Act cases.
One of Bove’s first acts as acting deputy attorney general was to end the Adams prosecution. Federal prosecutors had charged Adams last year with corruption-related charges for allegedly receiving a wide range of gifts and services from Turkish officials and businessmen in return for siding with them on local matters. Adams denied any wrongdoing and claimed the Biden administration had singled him out for his approach to immigration policy.
Where most people would see corruption and disgrace, Trump apparently saw opportunity. His victory in last November’s election led to a steady stream of supplicants making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in the hopes of receiving pardons, commutations, or favorable treatment from the president-elect. Among the pilgrims was Adams, who apparently sought an end to the federal prosecution against him. Trump, in turn, wanted Adams’s help as mayor in the upcoming immigration crackdown.
In addition to the obvious ethical problems, Bove also demonstrated his own shortcomings as a lawyer and potential judge. He drafted a memo on the dismissal that only served to further incriminate himself. Bove acknowledged that he had “reached this conclusion without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which this case is based,” effectively conceding that the decision was a sham.
In conversations with Adams’s lawyers, Bove stated outright that “the government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams’s assistance on immigration enforcement” and had the Justice Department memorialize that statement in a separate memo, apparently to de-incriminate himself. This is about as persuasive as writing “This is not a bribe” on a big sack of cash and handing it to an elected official after they do you a favor.
Things only got worse from there. Bove then played a key role in the Justice Department’s litigation tactics during the Alien Enemies Act deportations this spring, where he allegedly demonstrated a personal disdain for the federal judiciary and the rule of law. In March and April, the Trump administration tried to remove prospective deportees from the country without giving them due-process protections like advance notice or the ability to challenge their removals.
Erez Reuveni, a top career Justice Department lawyer, told Congress in a formal whistleblower complaint last month that Bove had suggested in advance that the government would defy the courts if they ruled against the deportations. According to Reuveni, who was fired for admitting the government had deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran gulag in error, Bove told him and other lawyers, in an advance meeting about the AEA deportations, that they should be prepared to say “Fuck you” to federal judges and to potentially “ignore” any such order if given.
Bove denied the allegations and said that he did not answer senators untruthfully when asked about the deportations during his confirmation hearing. Other whistleblowers have since come forward to confirm Reuveni’s account of the meeting. That sounds like it would be a good reason to slow down the nomination and look into things a little more closely. This is, after all, a lifetime federal judgeship. Since the Supreme Court only handles a few dozen cases a year nowadays, courts like the Third Circuit effectively have the final say in the overwhelming majority of federal lawsuits.
Fast-tracking Bove’s ascent to the federal appellate courts is not the end of this story, however. Judge James Boasberg, the federal judge who presided over one of the mid-flight AEA cases, is openly weighing whether Justice Department lawyers who allegedly misled and defied the court over deportation flights should be referred to their state bar associations for further discipline. He also already began criminal contempt proceedings into the matter, though those hearings are temporarily on hold by order of the D.C. Circuit.
If Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress next year, they will also have the opportunity to hold hearings on and issue subpoenas for further information about these scandals. That will necessarily mean reviewing Bove’s actions along the way and considering whether impeachment is appropriate. Some Democrats may be reluctant to scrutinize a sitting federal judge, but the alternative would be worse. Allowing Trump’s hatchet men to escape investigation simply because they were elevated to the federal judiciary would only reward them and validate that strategy in the future. Just because Republican senators have failed the nation by confirming Bove does not mean Democratic senators should follow suit by ignoring him.
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