President Trump is considering nominating Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official responsible for enacting his immigration agenda and ordering the purge of career prosecutors, to be a federal appeals judge, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Bove, 44, is a former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and a longtime federal prosecutor in New York. He was the Justice Department official at the center of the Trump administration’s request earlier this year to dismiss a corruption case against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.
One of the department’s most formidable and feared political appointees in the second Trump administration, he has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, those people said.
There are two vacancies on the court — one based in New Jersey and one in Delaware. It is not clear which seat Mr. Bove is under consideration for. He has a property in Pennsylvania, and some conservatives have called for moving the Delaware-based seat to Pennsylvania.
The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter that has not yet been publicly announced. They cautioned that the timing remains unclear, and the intentions could still shift.
If Mr. Bove is nominated for the post, Democrats are all but certain to use his Senate confirmation process to scrutinize his role in some of the Justice Department’s most contentious actions since Mr. Trump took office.
Those moves include the administration’s failure to return a group of Venezuelan migrants being sent to a Salvadoran prison without due process after a federal judge told a Justice Department lawyer to have the planes carrying them turned around.
A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The judicial post would be a lifetime appointment. Mr. Bove, a graduate of Georgetown Law School who prosecuted high-profile national security cases during nearly a decade in the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office, has told friends his longtime goal has been to serve as a federal judge, according to people in his orbit.
Mr. Bove is the top deputy to Todd Blanche, the department’s No. 2 official — reprising a partnership forged in their successful defense of Mr. Trump in his two federal trials.
His deceptively modest title, principal associate deputy attorney general — belies his power in the department. Because his post did not require Senate confirmation, Mr. Bove was among the first Trump appointees to arrive at the department in late January. He oversaw a succession of major policy and personnel moves, starting with a memo threatening to prosecute state and city officials who refused to carry out immigration enforcement, followed by a visit to Chicago to observe enforcement actions.
Mr. Bove has continued to play a pivotal role at the department even after Mr. Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi arrived weeks later, particularly on immigration, working closely with a top aide to the president, Stephen Miller.
But one of the more defining episodes of his tenure so far was the battle he waged against his former colleagues in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York over the administration’s request to drop bribery charges against the New York mayor, Mr. Adams.
Mr. Bove pressured top prosecutors in the office to drop the case. He claimed that the charges had been brought by an overzealous Biden-appointed U.S. attorney and arguing that the case would hinder Mr. Adams’ capacity to cooperate with the White House on immigration enforcement.
The interim U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned rather than sign off on Mr. Bove’s command.
Dropping the charges, “for reasons having nothing to do with the strength of the case,” went against the “duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor,” she wrote in a letter to Mr. Bove explaining her decision.
Mr. Bove, rebuffed by Ms. Sassoon, asked officials in the department’s Washington headquarters to take over the case, then have someone on their staff sign the dismissal.
Instead, five prosecutors in the criminal division and public integrity unit also quit, leaving their colleagues to furtively discuss their options, expressing their hope that they would not be called upon to take actions that would end with their resignation or termination.
Mr. Bove was forced to argue for the dismissal himself, appearing alone at the prosecution table at a February hearing in Manhattan federal court.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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