Judge Emil Bove Set Trump Assassination Photo As His Phone’s Lock Screen, Like A Proper Henchman

Your background photo selection is more of a window into your inner life than anything else. It’s the image greeting you eighty times a day when you check the time, answer emails, or check how many concessions the US gave to Iran while you were away. Which is why most people fill that screen with a wedding portrait, or dance recital, or just a sweeping vista reminding that nature exists until it can be plundered for fossil fuels.

Emil Bove put a bloodied portrait of his former client.

According to the New York Times, Third Circuit Judge Emil Bove set his iPhone background to a photo of Donald Trump raising his fist after the July 2024 assassination attempt that supposedly took off the top of his ear. Then that ear healed with the speed of a starfish regrowing a limb, in defiance of the ordinary laws of human biology. Imagine a life so fucking empty that the image you commune with daily is not the people who love you or a favored masterpiece, but a client going full Mussolini.^[1]

The Times got the detail from three people with direct knowledge, and reports that it caused “visible discomfort” among Bove’s colleagues — 13 of them, on a 14-seat court serving Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. To be clear, the Third Circuit was uncomfortable with a colleague showing such fawning affection for Trump and Donald Trump’s sister was on the Third Circuit.

The Times piece asks whether Bove’s loyalty to Trump might override his commitment to the rule of law. The phone seems to have answered that one.

All the ethics aside, “think about people in your life who might be inclined to use a photo of Donald Trump in this manner,” Jay Willis writes over at Balls and Strikes. “Are they normal, reasonable people whom you would describe as functioning adults with a firm grip on reality?”

In front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Bove complained about a “wildly inaccurate caricature” of himself in the press. “I am not anybody’s henchman,” he said with a straight face. Then he took his rubberstamped lifetime judicial appointment and turned up at a MAGA rally in Pennsylvania, to see-and-be-seen with the red-hat faithful while Trump called immigrants garbage from “shithole countries” and mused about a third term. Bove explained himself as “just here as a citizen coming to watch the president speak.” That earned him an ethics complaint now parked with the Third Circuit’s chief judge, which is where ethics complaints against judges tend to die. He has so far recused himself only from cases directly tied to his prior work for Trump, leaving open the much more consequential body of cases where he can do his henchmanly duties.

There are sanctuary cities challenges that could implicate Philadelphia, ICE’s ongoing deportation efforts are on a collision course for the courts, and Emil Bove — who, as a DOJ official, reportedly ordered his lawyers to tell the courts “fuck you” — now stands ready to act in any and all of these matters.

Two months ago, the Justice Department moved to force Judge Eleanor Ross off a Georgia election case claiming — stop me if this sounds familiar — that she lacked impartiality because she attended a 2024 primary victory party for Fulton County DA Fani Willis — a former colleague and friend since 1999 — who once prosecuted Trump. The standard that the DOJ committed to paper, over Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s signature:

“A judge who attended a party celebrating the election of a Democrat best known for prosecuting a Republican President for alleged election interference cannot then preside over a case concerning that President’s efforts to ensure election integrity.”

Is it too much to ask that we hold Ross and Bove to the same standard? Yes, apparently it is. Section 455 — that a judge should recuse where “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” — would, if applied honestly, disqualify Bove from an enormous class of cases. Everyone at Main Justice knows this, and so they look the other way where it would apply to him. But they deploy it at Ross because removing a judge who might rule against them is a rational return on a cheap motion.

And beyond the specific case of the DOJ seeking to meddle with Georgia’s voter rolls, Judge Ross faces impeachment calls. Meanwhile, Bove continues bringing his Temu Roy Cohn self to the courthouse every day to do what he can to assist the boss. Ross’s party with a former coworker is called a grave ethical lapse, and Bove’s party and the fact that he carries a shrine to the president in his pocket recede into footnotes.^[2]

Maybe Judge Ross should have explained that she was “just here as a citizen coming to watch the DA speak.” And, you know, not had sex in her chambers. At least Bove doesn’t have that problem.

Unless someone catches him staring at his lock screen for too long.

Emil Bove Defended Trump in Court. Then Trump Made Him a Judge. [NY Times]
Trump judge unsettles colleagues with provocative phone background photo [Raw Story]
Emil Bove’s Trump iPhone Wallpaper Might Be the Most Deranged Thing About Him [Balls and Strikes]

Earlier: Judge Emil Bove’s MAGA Rally Field Trip Sparks Judicial Misconduct Complaint
Emil Bove’s ‘I’m Not A Henchman’ T-Shirt Has People Asking Questions At Judicial Confirmation Hearing
Over 90 Former DOJ Lawyers Sign Letter Opposing Emil Bove Nomination… Oh, Wait, Sorry That’s 900

Note: The Trump photo in the meme is by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

[1] Mussolini also famously avoided a 1926 assassination attempt by turning his head at an opportune moment. He then made a show of wearing a bandage on his nose.
[2] See?

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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.