Senate confirms former Trump lawyer, federal prosecutor Emil Bove as Third Circuit judge

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Senate on Tuesday narrowly confirmed Emil Bove to become a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, marking a key victory for President Donald Trump and his judicial agenda.

Bove, who has served as a personal lawyer to the president as well as a federal prosecutor in New York, secured his spot on the federal bench despite months of scrutiny over his role as a top Justice Department official under the second Trump administration, weathering claims from several whistleblowers that he had abused his position and even misled Senate lawmakers considering his nomination.

Bove’s confirmation to the Third Circuit also comes after Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy took the unusual step of offering personal support for a nominee to the independent federal judiciary.

The Senate voted 50-49 to approve Bove, currently serving as principal associate deputy attorney general. Just two Republicans — Maine Senator Susan Collins and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, voted against the nominee. Collins in particular had said in the days leading up to Tuesday’s vote that she thought Bove “would not serve as an impartial jurist.”

The senators’ concerns echoed those of Democrats, who have painted Bove as a rank partisan and argued that he would be an ally of the president if confirmed to the federal bench.

“Like other individuals President Trump has installed in the highest positions of our government, Mr. Bove’s primary qualification appears to be his blind loyalty to the president,” Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin said on the Senate floor Tuesday morning.

Lawmakers have criticized Bove, who previously worked as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, for his actions as acting deputy attorney general in the early months of the second Trump administration. Democrats have pointed to his involvement in the Justice Department’s move to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, as well as the firings of federal prosecutors who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

And scrutiny on Bove has heightened in recent weeks amid a flurry of whistleblower reports claiming that he expressed willingness to defy lawful orders from a federal judge.

Former Justice Department attorney Erez Reuveni has said that the nominee told agency colleagues during a February meeting that they may need to tell a court “fuck you” to carry out the Trump administration’s planned mass deportations. And a pair of anonymous whistleblowers, in separate claims, reportedly backed up Reuveni’s revelations and provided evidence that Bove had misled lawmakers during a June hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

During that hearing, the nominee pushed back on claims that he would be an ally of the president if confirmed, telling senators that he was not Trump’s “henchman.” Bove also denied advising anyone to defy court orders and said that he could not recall making the purported “fuck you” comment.

Republican lawmakers have pushed back on criticism of Bove, with Iowa Senator and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley claiming that Democrats’ scrutiny “smacks” of a partisan smear job.

The Iowa Republican took to the Senate floor ahead of Bove’s confirmation vote Tuesday evening and slammed what he called an “eleventh-hour media smear” from Democrats against Bove, arguing that the other two whistleblowers — who both came forward in the last week — had hidden their information from the GOP.

Grassley also revealed that he had contacted Bove directly and asked him to respond to whistleblower claims that he had misled the Judiciary Committee. The nominee in his reply “flatly denied” those charges, the lawmaker said, including claims about his “fuck you” comment.

“Viewed in light of the transcript, Bove’s responses to compound, hostile questions about specific words used in a meeting that happened months before his hearing do not, to me, indicate deliberately false or misleading testimony,” said Grassley.

Partisan tensions over Bove’s nomination exploded earlier this month, when Democrats walked out of a Judiciary Committee meeting as the panel’s Republican majority shut down debate on the nominee and proceeded with a vote to advance him to the Senate floor. The committee approved Bove’s nomination on a 12-0 vote with no Democrats present, and though lawmakers framed the move as illegitimate, the upper chamber’s rules czar apparently did not agree.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has cast doubt on Reuveni’s credibility as a whistleblower, painting him as a disgruntled former employee. The agency fired Reuveni in April, a move he ties to his decision to acknowledge to a judge that the government had mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who has since been returned to the U.S. to face human trafficking charges.

Top Justice Department officials also took a particular interest in Bove’s nomination. Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche — who also previously served on Trump’s legal team — personally attended his June hearing in the Judiciary Committee.

Although the agency has said that Blanche and Bondi, who was already on Capitol Hill to testify in an unrelated hearing, were simply there to support a friend and colleague, Democrats and legal experts pointed out that the appearance of top administration officials at the confirmation hearing for a would-be federal judge was extremely unusual.

Some went as far as to suggest that Blanche and Bondi’s presence was an effort by the White House to pressure Republican lawmakers into supporting Bove, a move they said highlighted the closing gap between the executive branch and the nominally independent federal judiciary.

The Justice Department told Courthouse News last month that such thinking was “cynical and conspiratorial.”

Ahead of Bove’s Judiciary Committee vote, Blanche penned an op-ed published by Fox News in which he referred to the nominee as “Trump’s DOJ champion” and urged senators to confirm him.

Bove, now confirmed, joins the Third Circuit in a seat that the Joe Biden administration had tried — and failed — to fill. Senate Democrats last year could not secure enough support for Biden’s own Third Circuit nominee, New Jersey lawyer Adeel Mangi, after Republicans waged an intense messaging campaign, which sought to paint Mangi as a terrorist sympathizer and as anti-police.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sacrificed Mangi’s nomination alongside a group of other appellate nominees in a late-night deal with Republicans, which cleared GOP obstruction to a tranche of Biden appointees for federal district courts.

Mangi at the time excoriated the Senate for overseeing what he called a “fundamentally broken” judicial selection process and accused Republicans of leveling “shocking and false” attacks at him, suggesting in a letter to Biden that he had been targeted because of his Muslim faith.

“The strength of the Senate’s collective commitment to principle stands revealed,” he said.

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