Judge Emil Bove III, a federal appeals court judge who made his career as a stalwart supporter of President Trump, is now facing a complaint over his attendance at a campaign-style rally held by Mr. Trump at a Pennsylvania casino resort on Tuesday.
The complaint, which was filed on Wednesday with the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and was written by Gabe Roth, who heads the advocacy group Fix the Court, said that Judge Bove’s attendance at the rally violated rules that prohibit judges from “the appearance of impropriety” and engaging in “political activity.”
Judge Bove declined to comment. At the event, he said he was “just here as a citizen coming to watch the president speak,” according to a reporter from MSNBC who spotted him there.
Judge Bove previously served on Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team and was then chosen by Mr. Trump for a high-ranking job in the Justice Department. Mr. Trump’s selection of Judge Bove to the federal bench was a departure from his first-term judicial nominees, who were mostly well-known conservative lawyers with ties to the Federalist Society, not loyalists who had personally defended the president in court. The Senate narrowly confirmed him to the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in July.
In response to what is formally known as a “judicial conduct or disability complaint,” the circuit’s chief judge has the option of dismissing it or appointing a committee to investigate further. The committee can then recommend that a larger council of judges censure the judge or consider other punishments, such as deciding the judge will be assigned no new cases for a period of time.
Before becoming a judge, Mr. Bove had drawn considerable attention from critics for his hard-charging approach to implementing Mr. Trump’s agenda. During his stint at the Justice Department, he was involved in a March decision by the administration not to return two flights carrying Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, despite an order from Judge James E. Boasberg. Another senior justice department official, who has since been dismissed from the government, claimed that Mr. Bove talked openly about the possibility of flouting court orders, which he denied in his Senate confirmation hearing.
Earlier in his career, as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Mr. Bove helped investigate Honduran drug traffickers, which eventually led to the 2024 conviction of President Juan Orlando Hernández. After Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Hernández earlier this month, Judge Bove told the Times that “I completely trust and respect his judgment in exercising the pardon power, which the Constitution vests in him alone by virtue of his mandate from the American people.”
Judges are sometimes among the audience for presidential speeches, such as the State of the Union. But the complaint emphasized stridently partisan statements that Mr. Trump made at the Tuesday event, held in Mount Pocono, Pa.
In a meandering 90-minute speech that was billed as focusing on economic matters, Mr. Trump falsely disputed the fact that consumer prices were rising while lashing out at undocumented immigrants and transgender Americans. He used expletives in reference to some immigrants’ countries of origin, and said his predecessor, former President Joseph R. Biden, “destroyed our country.”
On Wednesday, a White House social media account called the event an “electric rally.”
“This was a highly charged, highly political event that no federal judge should have been within shouting distance of,” Mr. Roth wrote in his complaint.
Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge, agreed that the rally was a “political event,” and that Judge Bove’s attendance could have created “at least the appearance of partiality, particularly given what the president said.” Sitting on an appellate court, Judge Bove could be in a position to rule on some of the hundreds of lawsuits over Mr. Trump’s policies that are now making their way through the federal system.
“I can’t understand how he could possibly think it appropriate to go there,” said Edward Whelan, a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and a prominent conservative legal commentator. “You can argue about whether the rules clearly prohibit what he did, but he showed terrible judgment.”
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