During his second term as president, Donald Trump has given a lot of plum jobs to his personal criminal attorneys—which, to be fair, the convicted felon has a lot of. Gotta stuff ‘em all somewhere, right? But perhaps no one has received as sweet a reward as Emil Bove, currently awaiting his likely inevitable ascendance to a lifetime seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
The steady drip drip drip of bad news about Bove does not seem to be causing GOP senators any undue concern, though. Even Friday’s revelation that Bove admitted to meeting with the Alliance Defending Freedom, a hard-right evangelical law firm, to discuss his qualifications and confirmation does not seem to be slowing things down.
Sure, Sen. Susan Collins furrowed her brow and decided not to back Bove. That also goes for Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is back to pretending she has principles after casting a “yes” vote on the Big Beautiful Bill based solely on getting extra treats for Alaska and Alaska alone. But Collins and Murkowski both know that they can afford this little show of faux-independence because Bove clearly already has 50 Republican votes locked up.
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So let’s not expect that the news that Bove met with ADF will actually shake the GOP senators. It’s not like the firm has any cases that are just about to come before the Third Circuit … oh, wait. They sure do—a bigoted transphobic little number where the firm represents a conservative parent suing a school board for trans-ing her child, because that is totally how it works, definitely.
Let’s face it: The only real mystery as to how Bove would rule in favor of bigoted parents in the service of being terrible to trans kids at scale is whether he’d be doing it at the Third Circuit or when both he and this case somehow inexorably end up at the Supreme Court. You think Justice Samuel Alito is bad? Imagine a less astute, less qualified, more unhinged Alito.
But maybe Bove is just trying to emulate a different justice and hoping to take a run at being a replacement someday for Clarence Thomas, a jurist who never met a conflict of interest that applies to him—ever. Though Bove would have a long, long way to go to ever meet the level of corruption Thomas has achieved.
There’s no doubt that the right will spin the news of Bove’s meeting with the ADF as, “Well, nobody complained when the commies running the American Bar Association got to have a role in judicial nominations, and thank god we don’t have to let them any longer—but this is no different.”
Even the extremist Federalist Society appears to be boxed out of the direct access and puppet-mastering the conservative legal organization enjoyed during Trump’s first term. FedSoc poobah Leonard Leo and Trump had a recent falling-out over the fact that some of Trump’s own first-term nominees have had the gall to rule against him.
As bad as it was having the Federalist Society give Trump a slate of judges vat-grown in a lab to achieve conservative aims, even FedSoc is not like the ADF, which is an actual legal organization dedicated to bringing a very specific type of conservative demand before conservative judges 24/7. Now it looks a lot like they’re getting to shape judicial nominations.
Meanwhile, there’s news that another whistleblower has come forward to confirm the bombshell reveal from fired DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni that Bove told DOJ attorneys to disobey a court order. Yep, there’s more than one Department of Justice employee who has filed whistleblower declarations with the Department of Justice’s Inspector General. In fact, they filed their declarations back in May, before Reuveni did, so there’s no way to say this was manufactured to give additional support to Reuveni’s claims. The whistleblower’s declaration reports the same thing as Reuveni’s—that Bove directed the DOJ to defy a court order.
Bove is in many ways the perfect avatar of a Trump second-term judicial nominee: a thumb-headed rageaholic who is wildly unqualified for the job but sure that he’s the smartest guy in the room. He never doubts for a second that his role as judge is absolutely 100% to do what Trump wants, has no issues with being threatening in doing it, and has zero interest in assessing whether something creates the appearance of a conflict or is a conflict. Just give him the robe already, dammit.