Dating back to his first term, Donald Trump’s judicial nominations included nominees who were deeply unqualified, deeply unserious, and deeply problematic. But none of them — not the ghost hunters or the blog boys — managed to bring over 900 former Justice Department lawyers together in protest. So, congratulations to Emil Bove for setting a new record for judicial nihilism!
“It is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land, as it should be intolerable to anyone committed to maintaining our ordered system of justice,” reads the letter signed by nearly 1000 DOJ alumni. We’d already seen former judges speak out against this nomination, but the sheer number of people involved in this letter is absurd. It’s like the final battle of Endgame but with stronger opinions about PACER.
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Bove, Trump’s former personal attorney, faces his first Senate confirmation process as a nominee for a Third Circuit vacancy. It’s a first for the powerful DOJ official because he seized an astonishing amount of authority in a role that never required Senate confirmation. Indeed, he reportedly functionally ran the Department during those exciting times when Trump flirted with putting Matt Gaetz — of all people! — in the Attorney General’s chair.
According to a whistleblower report from a career DOJ attorney, it was Bove telling government lawyers they should tell federal judges “fuck you” in response to injunctions barring the administration’s haphazard deportations. Like the ones we know sent people to El Salvadoran slave camp by mistake.
More damning, if less colorful, is the corroborating memo suggesting that Bove ultimately approved the “what if we say the law doesn’t apply because the plane was over international waters” strategy.
And don’t forget the Eric Adams prosecution that led everyone involved with a functional conscience to resign:
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When Mr. Bove directed prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) and DOJ’s Public Integrity Section to dismiss the case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, his actions gave the appearance of impermissible political considerations stemming from President Trump’s immigration agenda. Former SDNY prosecutor Hagan Scotten encapsulated the problem in his resignation letter: “No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives.”
Expletives and questionable ethics are features not bugs for Trump, now decades into his pursuit of someone to replace Roy Cohn in his fixer firmament. Bove’s commitment to the dime store Roy Cohn bit (down to cultivating the look) earned him this nomination, jumping the queue over the army of Federalist Society hacks lined up for the post. Against all odds, we look back at the FedSoc era wistfully because while the judges were on balance unqualified and awful, several of them are actually good! This new era of Trump just elevating the lawyers who ingratiate themselves to him personally — Bove, Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, Jeanine Pirro, Alina Habba, Ed Martin — removes even the fig leaf of independence from the process. The Apprentice but with the rule of law at stake.
And when the goal is “making the boss happy no matter what” you end up with “we can send people to slave camp as long as we fly over the Gulf of Mexico, stet, AMERICA” and you eventually end up with a court system untethered from even the dubious intellectual guardrails of “textualism” or “originalism.”
It’s the era of pure patronage. Unless this Judiciary Committee steps up and puts a stop to it.
They won’t. Even with 900 new reasons why they should.
(Full letter on next page…)
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.