Washington As Republicans rejected whistleblower allegations against his actions at the Justice Department, the Senate confirmed Emil Bove, a former Trump attorney, 50-49 on Tuesday for a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge.
Bove, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, represented Trump in the two federal criminal prosecutions and was part of his legal team during his hush money trial in New York. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which considers issues from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, will have him on its panel.
Bove’s candidacy has been fiercely opposed by Democrats, who point to his role in the dismissal of the corruption prosecution against New York City Mayor Eric Adams and his present status as a prominent Justice Department official. They have also attacked his attempts to go into department officials who prosecuted hundreds of Trump supporters who participated in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Bove has accused FBI officers of “insubordination” for ordering the dismissal of a group of prosecutors involved in those criminal cases from January 6 and for refusing to release the names of agents who looked into the incident.
Whistleblowers cite evidence against Bove
Democrats have also referenced additional information from a whistleblower who did not go public, as well as testimony from a fired department lawyer who said last month that Bove had implied the Trump administration could have to disregard court orders—a allegation Bove refutes. According to two persons familiar with the recording, the whistleblower recently submitted an audio recording of Bove that contradicts several of his statements during his confirmation hearing last month.
According to quotations from the recording that The Associated Press received, the audio is from a private video conference call at the Department of Justice in February when Bove, a senior officer at the department, talked about how he handled the case against Adams that was dismissed.
Since the whistleblower has not released the recording to the public, the individuals talked under the condition of anonymity. The Washington Post was the first to report on the whistleblower’s allegations.
Since GOP senators have deferred to Trump on almost all of his selections, none of that evidence has been sufficient to change Senate Republicans’ votes, and all but two of them voted to approve Bove.
Democrats say Bove’s confirmation is a ‘dark day’
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader of the Senate from New York, called Bove’s confirmation a “dark day” and claimed that Republicans are only backing him because of his allegiance to the president.
“It’s unfathomable that just over four years after the insurrection at the Capitol, when rioters smashed windows, ransacked offices, desecrated this chamber, Senate Republicans are willingly putting someone on the bench who shielded these rioters from facing justice, who said their prosecution was a grave national injustice,” Schumer stated.
Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, both Republicans, voted against Bove’s confirmation. “I don’t think that somebody who has counseled other attorneys that you should ignore the law, you should reject the law, I don’t think that that individual should be placed in a lifetime seat on the bench,” Murkowski said on Tuesday.
Bove confronted the criticism of his tenure during his confirmation hearing last month, telling lawmakers that he recognizes that some of his choices “have generated controversy.” Bove, however, claimed that he has been falsely described as Trump’s “enforcer” and “henchman” at the department.
Just before the vote, on Tuesday night, Bove wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee to say that although he does not have the whistleblower’s audio, he is “undeterred by this smear campaign.”
A February call emerges as evidence
During the Judiciary Committee hearing, senators questioned Bove about the February 14 call with attorneys in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. The call had garnered a lot of media attention due to Bove’s unusual request that the attorneys have an hour to determine who would submit the motion to dismiss the case against Adams on the department’s behalf.
The department was in a state of considerable turmoil when the prosecutors who had handled the case in New York and Washington resigned instead of agreeing to drop the case.
As per the February conversation record, Bove stated at the beginning that Daniel Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for Manhattan, “resigned about ten minutes before we were going to put her on leave pending an investigation.” However, when asked during the hearing if he had begun by highlighting the fact that Sassoon and another prosecutor had disregarded orders and that Sassoon would be relocated prior to her resignation, Bove simply replied, “No.”
Bove defended his testimony as factual in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, pointing out that the call record demonstrates he did not use the word “reassigned” when speaking with the prosecutors.
At another point, Bove claimed he could not remember expressing in the call’s transcript that whoever signed the request to dismiss the Adams case would become the section’s leaders.
However, Bove stated in the letter to Grassley that he did not mean to imply that anyone would receive compensation for sending the memo, but rather that doing so would demonstrate a readiness to follow the chain of command, which he claimed was the “bare minimum required of mid-level management” of a government agency.
Republicans decry ‘unfair accusations’
On Tuesday, Grassley expressed his belief that Bove will be a “diligent, capable, and fair jurist.”
His team had attempted to look into the allegations, he added, but the whistleblowers’ attorneys refused to provide them with all the information they requested until Tuesday, just hours before the vote. allegedly “vicious rhetoric, unfair accusations and abuse directed at Mr. Bove” had “crossed the line,” added Grassley.
A former Justice Department attorney who was dismissed in April after acknowledging in court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who had been residing in Maryland, had been inadvertently deported to a prison in El Salvador, filed the first whistleblower complaint against Bove.
Erez Reuveni, that attorney, detailed how, in the weeks prior to his dismissal, senior Justice Department officials attempted to obstruct and mislead courts to carry out deportations that the White House supported.
Reuveni recounted a March discussion at the Justice Department regarding Trump’s intentions to use the Alien Enemies Act in response to what he said was an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. According to Reuveni, Bove brought up the potential for a court to halt the deportations before they could take place. According to Reuveni’s attorneys, Bove used foul language when he stated that the department should think about instructing the courts on what to do and “ignore any such order,” according to the complaint.
According to Bove, he has “no recollection of saying anything of that kind.”
Copyright 2025 NPR
