The Quickest Route to a Plum Judicial Appointment

The Atlantic

3 days ago

Emil Bove has had a busy six months at the Department of Justice. Appointed to a leadership role by President Donald Trump almost immediately after the inauguration, Bove quickly set about establishing himself as a feared enforcer of presidential will. He personally fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 rioters, pushed other prosecutors to resign rather than go along with what they considered to be unethical orders, and accused FBI officials of ' insubordination ' for refusing to hand over a list of FBI agents to fire for political reasons. According to a whistleblower, Bove played a key role in encouraging the administration to defy court orders, suggesting that the department should consider telling judges, 'Fuck you.'
Under any previous administration, revelations of behavior like this would probably have been enough to get Bove fired. They might even have been enough to bring down the attorney general, if not the presidency as a whole. But this is the second Trump administration, so instead of being punished, Bove was rewarded with a nomination to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed him to that seat, 50 to 49, with all Democrats voting against the nominee. (Republican Senator Bill Hagerty did not vote; his GOP colleagues Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski cast their votes against Bove.)
As an appellate judge, Bove, who is 44 years old, will have a hand in shaping the law for decades to come. Even more significant is the message that his confirmation sends to bright young lawyers seeking to get ahead. During Trump's first term, the president was able to tilt the courts to the right with a slate of judicial nominees hand-selected by the leadership of the conservative Federalist Society. Many of these judges were ideologically extreme, but their road to a nomination came through a legal movement that, whatever its flaws, had developed a distinct culture and set of jurisprudential principles that sometimes conflicted with devotion to Trump or the MAGA movement. Bove's confirmation suggests that, in Trump's second term, the route to a plum judicial appointment may be distinguishing oneself as a bruiser willing to do anything for Trump himself.
When, in late November, the president-elect announced that he would pick Bove to help run the Justice Department, Bove was best known for his role as a member of Trump's criminal-defense team. Even so, his résumé seemed relatively normal for an appointee of the new administration. Over the course of the New York hush-money trial in spring 2024, he'd appeared regularly in the Manhattan courtroom alongside Todd Blanche, whom Trump would later nominate as deputy attorney general. Bove was a capable litigator with a light touch in front of the judge that seemed at odds with his dour appearance: a shaved head and a long, saturnine face that, together with his dark suit, led some journalists watching the trial to joke about his resemblance to Nosferatu.
Listen: The wrecking of the FBI
Even in this period, Bove gave no public signs of being a MAGA diehard. His legal pedigree is respectable, without any obvious ideological tilt one way or the other. He went to Georgetown Law School and spent years as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, a famously hard-charging corner of the Justice Department, before leaving in 2021 to work in private practice.
Bove's time in the Southern District was not without controversy. He was reportedly reprimanded for abusive management and left the office not long after a judge excoriated a unit he led for hiding exculpatory evidence in a terrorism trial. His job as Trump's lawyer, meanwhile, raised the potential for conflicts of interest. But he was not an obviously bad pick to serve as the deputy attorney general's lead adviser—especially compared with the slate of conspiracy theorists and unqualified media figures chosen to lead various crucial departments.
This soothing notion did not persist for long. On January 31, when Bove fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 defendants, he quoted Trump's assertion that the lawyers' work constituted a 'grave national injustice.' The choice of language was particularly striking because Bove himself, as NBC News would soon report, had pushed aggressively during his first stint at the DOJ to be involved in investigating the insurrection. This hypocrisy did not seem to trouble him.
Bove continued to establish himself as Trump's hatchet man, the avatar of a new order under which the Justice Department's guiding star was not even-handed enforcement of the law but immediate assent to whatever Trump said. In February, Bove forced his old office in the Southern District to end the corruption prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams's assistance with immigration roundups. This was so jaw-droppingly inappropriate that it ultimately led 10 department lawyers, including the acting head of the Southern District, to resign rather than carry out the order. The judge in the case reluctantly acknowledged that his only choice was to dismiss the charges, but he did so in a manner that blocked the government from dangling a future prosecution over Adams's head, decrying the apparent scheme as ' grave betrayal of the public trust. '
Trump, however, was pleased. He announced Bove's nomination to the federal bench on May 28, in a Truth Social post. 'He will end the Weaponization of Justice,' the president wrote of the new nominee. 'Emil Bove will never let you down!'
Shortly afterward, whistleblower testimony surfaced from yet another fired Justice Department lawyer who alleged that Bove had played a significant role in encouraging the government to defy court orders in multiple immigration cases. According to the whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, Bove was a key driver behind the government's decision to send Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison under the Alien Enemies Act despite a court ordering it not to. At his confirmation hearing on June 25, when he was asked directly whether he had suggested potentially defying the court, Bove did not quite deny the allegations. Instead, he said he had 'conveyed the importance' of the flight to El Salvador and did not recall the specifics of which words he used. In the days before the confirmation vote, another whistleblower announced that they had alerted the Senate Judiciary Committee of additional information corroborating Reuveni's report. News also broke of a third whistleblower who had attempted to warn Republican senators that Bove had lied in his confirmation hearing concerning his role in tossing out the Adams prosecution.
Bove's nomination produced a flood of opposition. More than 80 retired judges and more than 900 former Justice Department lawyers signed letters urging the Senate to reject his appointment. 'It is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land,' the former government attorneys wrote. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board voiced concern. Other prominent supporters of Trump's first-term efforts to shift the courts to the right dissented as well. 'I have serious doubts that Bove has the character and integrity to be worthy of confirmation as a federal judge,' warned Ed Whelan, a conservative strategist known for his work shepherding the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.
Republican senators, apparently, were not swayed. Nor could a series of last-minute revelations—including that the Justice Department Office of Inspector General said it had 'lost' the second whistleblower's complaint, and that the Adams whistleblower had recorded audio of Bove making the incriminating statements—change their minds. Speaking on the Senate floor after the vote, Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, where Bove's new judgeship is based, lamented the chamber's 'abdication of its responsibilities.'
How Judge Bove will comport himself on the bench is not obvious. During his confirmation hearing, he seemed to support an aggressive vision of unilateral presidential power in line with arguments that the Trump administration has pursued in court. There is widespread speculation that Bove will use his spot on the Third Circuit to audition for the Supreme Court. Or perhaps he will be satisfied with his achievement, taking advantage of a lifetime appointment to drop his pro-Trump posturing.
Whatever approach Bove takes from here, his path so far has demonstrated that total sycophancy to the president can be a fantastic career move for ambitious lawyers—especially those for whom other avenues of success might not be forthcoming. During Trump's first term, the president essentially outsourced his judicial nominations to Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. With the administration pushing to appoint as many judges as possible to reshape the federal bench, affiliation with the conservative legal movement was the smart play for up-and-coming attorneys dreaming of a judicial appointment. Now, though, the alliance between the president and the movement is splintering, as some of the administration's tactics prove too much even for judges on the right. In May, after a panel of three judges—including one whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term—blocked tariffs from going into effect, Trump raged against Leo and the Federalist Society. Leo, the president wrote on Truth Social, was a 'bad person' and a 'sleazebag.'
From the January/February 2024 issue: A MAGA judiciary
Trump's alignment with legal conservatives was never entirely stable. In the long term, Trump couldn't accept an equal partnership with a community whose primary fealty is to a system of reasoning that does not orbit entirely around his whims. Although many Trump-appointed judges are all too willing to go along with his plans, every exception is, to Trump, a personal insult. Still, even as cracks showed between Trump and Leo, there was always the question of where Trump would find his next batch of judges. Now we have an answer: enforcers like Bove.
The newest member of the Third Circuit does not appear to have been an ideologue. Instead, his résumé suggests an ambitious lawyer who was looking to get ahead. When he had a chance to distinguish himself by pushing hard on investigating January 6, he did that. When the winds changed, he changed with them. What is striking about Bove is just how normal he once was, and how normal his path to the bench may soon come to seem.