By Perry Stein — Trump picks top Justice Dept. official who was his lawyer to be a judge
President Donald Trump’s latest pick for the federal bench is a top Justice Department official who steered the effort to drop criminal charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams and has been pivotal in executing the department’s immigration policies and personnel upheaval.
Trump said on social media on Wednesday that he is nominating Emil Bove – the Justice Department’s principal associate deputy attorney general – to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Bove served on the president’s personal defense team during the Biden administration, representing Trump as he fought multiple state and federal criminal indictments. Inside the Justice Department, Bove is known as a combative Trump loyalist, defending the president’sagenda and demanding that political and career staffers align with the administration.
The Senate will need to confirm Bove’s nomination for the lifetime appointment, and Democrats will likely scrutinize his short but contentious stint atJustice.
“Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone,” Trump posted on social media. “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!”
Bove worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York years agobefore leaving for a private law firm in New Jersey. When Todd Blanche – currently the deputy attorney general, the second most powerful position at the Justice Department – started his own small firm so he could defend Trump in his criminal indictments, he recruited Bove to work alongside him.
Blanche and Bove had previously worked together at the New York prosecutor’s office. Bove, whose Justice Department position does not require Senate approval, filled in as acting deputy attorney general while Blanche awaited confirmation during the first six weeks of the administration.
Bove was not known to be involved in Republican politics before his stint in the Justice Department, but since then, has been at the forefront of some of the law enforcement agency’s most controversial actions.
In the first weeks of the administration, Bove ordered the firing of at least eight senior FBI officials and a sweeping examination of the work of thousands of other bureau employees, including all those who worked on investigations tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The ousted leaders oversaw intelligence, national security, cyber-investigations, and the bureau’s science and technology branch.
Bove also signed the memo that directed federal prosecutors nationwide to investigate and potentially bring criminal charges against state and local officials who don’t cooperate with the president’s plans to carry out mass deportations.
And Bove ordered Justice Department officials to dismiss the federal corruption case against Adams. That decision led to more than half a dozen veteran Justice Department attorneys resigning in protest, including the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and most of the senior leadership of the Justice Department’s public integrity division, which prosecutes corruption crimes.
Bove had said in a letter to prosecutors that his decision was not based on the evidence or legal theories driving the prosecution. Instead, he said, the case was interfering with Adams’s ability to cooperate with Trump’s immigration enforcement endeavors and efforts to address violent crime.
As Bove struggled to find two prosecutors to sign a motion requesting that a judge dismiss the case, he summoned the roughly two dozen remaining members of the public integrity unit and ordered them to figure out who would file the dismissal motion. He made clear that lawyers not willing to do so could be fired and those who were could be promoted, The Washington Post reported at the time.
In the end, Bove found one public integrity section attorney and another Justice Department political appointee to sign the request. And in a highly unusual move, Bove appeared in front of a New York judge to personally defend the government’s decision to dismiss the case.
“I don’t think there’s anything particularly exotic about”seeking to drop the charges, Bove told the federal judge.
More recently, Bove clashed with the Trump-appointed general counsel of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives over whether to drop the agency’s opposition to a controversial device that allows semiautomatic weapons to be fired like machine guns.
