WASHINGTON — The Senate on a party-line vote on Tuesday confirmed Emil J. Bove, President Trump’s defense lawyer and loyal ally atop the Justice Department, to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The vote was 49 to 50.
Bove, 44, was a highly controversial judicial nominee, not because of his legal views, but because he led a purge of prosecutors and FBI agents who had worked on cases growing out of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Before this year, the Justice Department held to a tradition of keeping politics out of law enforcement. But Bove and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi saw their missions as carrying out the wishes of President Trump, including his plans for retribution against the prosecutors and investigators who brought charges against him or the 1,500 Trump allies who stormed the Capitol and fought with police.
In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, Bove served as the acting head of the Justice Department before Bondi was confirmed by the Senate.
Bove also ordered federal prosecutors in New York to drop bribery and corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams. The move prompted several of them to resign over what they saw as an unethical deal to win the mayor’s cooperation in the administration’s plan to round up immigrants who are in the country illegally.
Bove also played a key role in the new administration’s clash with a federal judge over deporting Venezuelans to a brutal prison in El Salvador. A former Justice Department attorney-turned-whistleblower said Bove told government lawyers they should ignore orders from the judge who sought to halt the deportations.
When Bove appeared before a Senate committee as a judicial nominee, he said he had been misunderstood and unfairly criticized.
“I am not an enforcer” or “anybody’s henchman,” he said.
Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, who partnered with Bove in defending Trump last year, said he had been smeared by unfair criticism.
“Emil is the most capable and principled lawyer I have ever known,” he wrote in a Fox News opinion column.
Democrats said Bove did not deserve a promotion to the federal courts.
Sen. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) described Bove as a partisan loyalist who served Trump as “the instrument of his vengeance.”
“When Trump wanted to purge the department of prosecutors who had proved to juries beyond a reasonable doubt that the violent offenders who attacked police officers that day did so to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power, Emil Bove was there to punish not the criminals, but the prosecutors,” Schiff said in opposing the nomination.
On Tuesday, Bove was called a “diligent, capable and fair jurist” by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), according to the Associated Press.
Bove is not likely to have much influence on the 3rd Circuit Court. Its 14 judges hear appeals from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Bove has no experience as a judge and has not written on legal or constitutional issues.
However, if Justices Clarence Thomas or Samuel A. Alito were to retire in the next three years, Trump could nominate him to the Supreme Court.
His nomination drew unusually broad opposition from the legal community.
In a July 15 letter to the Senate, 80 former and retired judges said confirming Bove to a life-term judgeship undercuts the rule of law and respect for the federal courts. They said his “egregious record of mistreating law enforcement officers, abusing power and disregarding the law itself disqualifies him for this position.”
More than 900 former Justice Department attorneys signed a letter to the Senate saying “it is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land.”
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, became the first Republican to declare her opposition to his nomination.
“We have to have judges who will adhere to the rule of law and the Constitution and do so regardless of what their personal views may be,” she said in a statement. “Mr. Bove’s political profile and some of the actions he has taken in his leadership roles at the Department of Justice cause me to conclude he would not serve as as impartial jurist.”
Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were the only Republicans to vote against Bove.
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