Trump DoJ ally denies claim he urged defying court orders on immigration

Emil Bove, a top justice department official and former defense attorney for Donald Trump, denied to senators on Wednesday a whistleblower’s claim that he suggested prosecutors ignore orders from judges who ruled against the president’s immigration policy.

In a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee to consider his nomination to serve as a federal appeals court judge, Bove, currently the principal associate deputy attorney general at the justice department, also rejected assertions from Democrats that corruption charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams were dropped in order to secure his cooperation with the president’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The hearing convened hours after reports emerged that former justice department attorney Erez Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging that Bove said prosecutors “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’” in instances when they rule against Trump’s immigration policies.

“I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order,” Bove said in response to questions from the committee’s chair, Chuck Grassley.

A former New York City-based federal prosecutor, Trump hired Bove as an attorney to defend him against the four state and federal indictments he faced before winning re-election last year. He then appointed Bove as acting justice department deputy attorney general his first weeks back in the White House, during which time he fired prosecutors who brought charges against January 6 rioters and requested a list of FBI agents who worked on the cases. He also oversaw legal motions to drop charges against Adams, which prompted the resignation of seven veteran prosecutors in New York who refused to cooperate.

During his confirmation hearing for a seat on the appeals court overseeing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the US Virgin Islands, Republican lawmakers signaled no objections to moving his nomination to the Senate floor, while Bove described himself as unfairly maligned.

“There is a wildly inaccurate caricature of me in the mainstream media,” Bove said in his opening remarks. “I am not anybody’s henchman. I’m not an enforcer. I’m a lawyer from a small town who never expected to be in an arena like this.”

Democrats described Bove as exactly what he claims not to be, with the committee’s ranking member, Dick Durbin, saying he “led the effort to weaponize the Department of Justice against the president’s enemies. Having earned his stripes as a loyalist to this president, he’s been rewarded with this lifetime nomination.”

Durbin went on to allege that ending Adams’s prosecution amounted to “a quid pro quo” arrangement in which a federal judge “foiled your plans” by ordering the charges dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could not be brought again.

“In order to get Mayor Adams to cooperate with President Trump’s immigration policy, you were prepared to drop the charges against him?” Durbin asked.

Bove, who showed little emotion in responding to Democrats’ skeptical questioning, replied: “That’s completely false.”

Durbin demanded details of Bove’s decision to fire prosecutors who worked on January 6 case, noting that in a memo, he echoed Trump’s words in describing the prosecutions as “a grave national injustice”.

“I did and continue to condemn unlawful behavior, particularly violence against law enforcement. At the same time, I condemn heavy handed and unnecessary tactics by prosecutors and agents. Both of those things I submit are characteristic of these events,” Bove said, adding that the prosecutors were fired because they were specifically tasked with working on January 6 cases.

Asked if he condemned Trump’s decision to pardon all those who were convicted or prosecuted over the insurrection, Bove replied: “It’s not for me to question president Trump’s exercise of the pardon power any more than it would be for me to question president Biden’s commutation of death sentences or his pardons of drug traffickers.”

Republicans often angled their questions toward standing up Trump’s claim that he faced unfair prosecutions by a justice department that had become “weaponized” under Biden. Senator John Kennedy asked Bove to detail a time he saw a justice department employee act “predominantly on the basis of his or her political beliefs”.

Bove replied that he witnessed such conduct only while serving as a defense attorney for Trump, where he alleged that members of special counsel Jack Smith’s team took “positions about the need to go to trial quickly … that I found, in my experience, to be completely inconsistent with normal practice, which led me to draw in inferences of the nature that you’re suggesting.”

None of the two federal indictments Smith secured against Trump went to trial prior to his election victory last November.