Emil Bove’s ‘I’m Not A Henchman’ T-Shirt Has People Asking Questions At Judicial Confirmation Hearing

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“It is my great honor to nominate Emil Bove to serve as a Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,” the president screeched out on social media on May 28. “Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone. He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. Emil Bove will never let you down!”

So much for the wages of sin.

The president’s personal lawyer spent the past five months disgracing the Justice Department and his professional oath. He is currently the subject of a whistleblower complaint alleging that he deliberately defied court orders and instructed DOJ lawyers to do the same. And for his loyalty, he’s being rewarded with lifetime tenure on the appellate bench.

Worst villain origin story ever

Emil Bove, III began his career at the Southern District of New York, where he was by all accounts a competent prosecutor. His management style left something to be desired, however, and he was denied promotion for “abusive” behavior toward his subordinates.

In 2022, he left the DOJ for private practice, and the following year teamed up with Todd Blanche, another SDNY alum who left the white-shoe law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to represent Donald Trump in his criminal cases. The only one that went to trial was the Manhattan prosecution, where a jury found their client guilty of 34 counts of creating a false business record. But Trump values obedience over competence, and so he gave Blanche and Bove the top jobs at DOJ, serving under another of his personal lawyers, Pam Bondi.

Heel turn

Back in 2021, Bove worked January 6 cases at SDNY. But one of the first things he did on his return to the Department was to launch a mass purge of prosecutors who worked January 6 cases.

“I do not believe the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” he wrote in a memo obtained by the Washington Post.

As Trump’s personal lawyer, Bove signed his name to dozens of briefs lobbing baseless charges of politicization at the DOJ. But once ensconced at Main Justice, he set about reordering the DOJ to achieve Trump’s political ends.

He tried without success to gin up criminal charges in connection with billions of dollars in greenbanking funds allocated by Congress and disbursed in the final year of Biden’s presidency. He threatened to arrest local officials who exercise their rights under the the Tenth Amendment not to cooperate with federal immigration mandates. And he blew up the prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams in hopes of blackmailing the elected Democrat to enact the administration’s immigration priorities.

On February 10, he ordered Danielle Sassoon, the then-acting US Attorney for SDNY, to dismiss the pending prosecution of the mayor for taking bribes from Turkish officials. Bove ordered her to seek a dismissal without prejudice, allowing the government to hold the threat of re-indictment over Adams if he failed to do what they asked, particularly when it came to immigration.

“If a criminal prosecution cannot be used to punish political activity, it likewise cannot be used to induce or coerce such activity,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “Threatening criminal prosecution even to gain an advantage in civil litigation is considered misconduct for an attorney.”

He responded with an absolutely deranged letter, defending the propriety of a political quid pro quo with a criminal defendant and accusing Sassoon of insubordination and dereliction of duty.

But it turns out that behind the scenes, Bove was doing even more crazy illegal shit to carry out the president’s agenda.

Whistle while you work

On June 24, the New York Times published a whistleblower complaint filed by former Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni. Reuveni served as Acting Deputy Director for the Office of Immigration Litigation until April 5, when he was fired for telling the truth to a federal judge in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man wrongfully deported to El Salvador. Reuveni refused to say that Abrego was a known terrorist (he wasn’t) and argue that this voided the immigration judge’s order staying his removal as a matter of law (it didn’t).

But before he was fired, Reuveni witnesssed a shocking pattern of disregard for court orders by leadership at the DOJ, particularly Bove.

Bove was instrumental in structuring the rollout of the Alien Enemies Act proclamation so as to ensure that the men renditioned to CECOT in El Salvador could never get due process. According to Reuveni, Bove instructed the DOJ get it done, even if they had to disregard court orders:

Bove then made a remark concerning the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated. Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts “fuck you” and ignore any such court order. Mr. Reuveni perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room. Mr. Reuveni and others were quickly ushered out of the room.

And in fact the DOJ did disregard Judge James Boasberg’s order to turn the planes around. Reuveni says that Deputy Assistant AG Drew Ensign lied in court when he said he did not know if and when planes of detainees were taking off. Reuveni alleges that “Ensign had been present in the previous day’s meeting when Emil Bove stated clearly that one or more planes containing individuals subject to the AEA would be taking off over the weekend no matter what.”

Bove is credited with coming up with the plan to allege that the DOJ complied with Judge Boasberg’s order because the planes were out of US air space by the time the judge put his oral order in writing. Notably Bove refused to put his name on the motion making this fakakta argument on the public docket. And Ensign is now smack in the middle of Judge Boasberg’s contempt inquiry.

Bove also encouraged the DOJ to defy another court’s immigration order in Massachusetts. In that case, Judge Brian Murphy barred the Department of Homeland Security from deporting immigrants to third countries without notice and opportunity to object under the Convention Against Torture. The government repeatedly defied this order, including in one episode where DHS flew detainees to Gitmo and handed them over to the Department of Defense to transport them to CECOT.

Reuveni does not say if Bove was the brain genius behind the plan to argue that this did not violate the court’s order, since DOD wasn’t a party to the case, and no DHS employees were on the plane to El Salvador. But he says that Bove was pissed that he tried to comply with the court order to ascertain how this violation had occurred:

Mr. Reuveni received phone call from Acting AAG Roth in which Roth relayed that Bove was very unhappy that Mr. Reuveni had contacted counsel at various agencies to ascertain whether DOJ had violated court order Roth conveyed that Mr. Reuveni should stop emailing agency counsel on the matter to instead communicate by phone only where possible.46 Mr. Reuveni understood this instruction to be based on leadership’s aim to avoid generating written material subject to disclosure through FOIA.

Third Circuit, here he comes!

On Wednesday, June 25, Bove appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is considering his nomination to the Third Circuit.

He opened by insisting, “I am not anybody’s henchman, I am not an enforcer. I’m a lawyer from a small town, who never expected to be in an arena like this.”

That is horseshit, of course. No one gets to “an arena like this” without a healthy dose of ambition. Note that Bove’s aw shucks modesty didn’t extend to telling the White House that he’d be a more appropriate nominee the US District Court.

And although his tone during the hearing was measured, his willingness to twist the truth was on full display

Asked about the Adams case, Bove pointed to the order dismissing the charges as proof that he’d behaved appropriately. In reality, the Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute left the court little choice. And Judge Dale Ho denied the DOJ’s request to dismiss without prejudice, because allowing the Trump administration to reap the benefits of a corrupt bargain would be “difficult to square with the words engraved above the front entrance of the United States Supreme Court: ‘Equal Justice Under Law.’”

Bove denied telling subordinates to defy a court order, but said he just plum couldn’t remember if he’d told them to give the bird to a federal judge.

Over and over he simply refused to answer questions based on spurious claims about the deliberative process privilege. But, he assured the senators, all was on the up and up, even if he couldn’t commit to recusing from cases involving his former client Donald Trump.

And if any Republican senator might be tempted to vote no, he brought out the big guns. Alan Dershowitz, late of Harvard Law (and his marbles), sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee gushing that “Mr. Bove’s superior character, demeanor and diligence are evident throughout his time as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, as well as in private practice.”

FACTS NOT IN EVIDENCE! But when you’ve got the votes, it doesn’t really matter.

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast. You can subscribe to her Substack by clicking the logo:

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