It’s indoor work, and there’s no heavy lifting: a top former personal attorney and bagman for the President — and current DOJ official — is now the nominee for a seat on a federal appeals court.
President Trump nominated Emil Bove III to a seat on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday. He said in a Truth Social post that he expected Bove to use his seat on the federal circuit court to “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!” Trump wrote.
In a DOJ now led by former personal attorneys to the President and increasingly staffed by a mixture of ideologues and careerists devoted to exploring new and creative ways to please the White House, Bove has distinguished himself. That’s in part a feature of his brazenness: he’s been at the forefront of the new administration’s push to break down the barrier that long existed between federal criminal law enforcement and political decision-making in the White House. Bove, during his tenure as acting Deputy Attorney General and then principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, acted as if that barrier was never there.
He entered the DOJ earlier this year with no cooling-off period after defending Trump in his criminal cases. He had spent much of 2024 representing Trump in his Manhattan hush money trial. Days before the President was inaugurated, Bove appeared again in person in Manhattan state court for the surreal spectacle of Trump being sentenced to nothing.
Then, within weeks, Bove was leading the DOJ while Trump’s other nominees awaited confirmation. There, he distinguished himself as an unusually fierce advocate for Trump’s political priorities. In the administration’s first days, Bove told prosecutors to investigate and consider prosecuting state and local officials who oppose the Trump administration’s wanton approach to immigration policy.
In February, Bove applied that logic to an individual: New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Bove led negotiations with Adams’ legal team and with Manhattan federal prosecutors, part of an attempt to turn the preexisting corruption case against Adams into leverage: the DOJ, Bove offered, would dismiss the case, for now. And, the deal went, if Adams complied with Trump’s immigration priorities, prosecutors would not revive the charges.
The deal provoked the resignation of several Manhattan federal prosecutors, including the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bove then tried and failed to persuade other lawyers to appear with him at a court hearing in the case, an episode that saw several members of the DOJ Criminal Division’s Public Integrity Section resign. Bove eventually appeared at the hearing alone, an extraordinary move for a high-ranking federal law enforcement official.
The deal had to pass muster before the federal district judge trying the case, Dale Ho. It failed to do so. Judge Ho ordered the case permanently dismissed, but said that Bove had done something unique: he was unable to find another example of a prosecution being withheld in order to “facilitate federal policy goals,” and, Ho added, it appeared to violate “the basic promise of equal justice under law.”
Bove had served in the Manhattan federal prosecutors’ office during the first Trump administration and for the first year of the Biden administration. There, he helped prosecute January 6 rioters, and reportedly became known for a “bellicose” management style.
The irony here is that in the Trump administration’s first weeks Bove laid the groundwork for firing prosecutors and investigators who worked on the Jan. 6 cases. It was, reportedly, Bove who ordered FBI leadership to come up with a list of every agent or staff member assigned to the Jan. 6 investigation, the largest criminal probe in U.S. history.
It’s not clear to what seat Trump nominated Bove. There are two open seats on the 3rd Circuit; one in New Jersey, and another in Delaware.
Trump said in the post that Bove was “SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone.” The DOJ did not immediately return a request for comment on Bove’s behalf.
Now here is a guy who has no qualifications for being on the Court of Appeals. Bet he wins confirmation in a walk.
And now…THIS…King Turd considering pardoning the thugs who plotted to kidnap Whitmer!
Hey Jake Tapper! You still going to give your pal Trump pass after pass?
The Senators for Delaware and New Jersey are Democrats, and they most likely will not return blue slips to give their permission for this nomination to go forward. Republican leadership has said they will respect the blue slip tradition, I think we’re about to see if that’s true, you can bet that Trump will put all kinds of pressure on them to ignore the Democrats and push this through.
The judiciary becoming even more Trumpist is one of the bad consequences of Trump winning…it’s going to take a long time to get rid of that damage. Bove gets pretty close to the bottom of who you could pick to be a judge, but I suspect we’re going to see worse selections going forward…with Democrats unlikely to win back the Senate in 2026 there’s not much to be done about it either. I suspect every non-Trump judge is going to do the very best not to leave the bench for as long as they can while Trump remains in office.
If Bove were to be confirmed to a seat on the 3rd Circuit (I think this is not for either of the ones suggested but for the one for the 9th circle of hell), given that he’s represented Trump in the past, wouldn’t he need to recuse himself from every case involving a Trump initiative?
Trump’s appointing his personal lawyers to positions in DOJ is an outrage (but apparently not an actionable breach of any ethical standard), but this surely must cross the line.