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Emil Bove Act Dep Ag

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YIKES APPEALS JUDGE 7 25

enforcer

4 of trump personal liars in DOJ? blanche they mostly lost in ct?

emil bove fail

fed soc civil war 6 25

an 2 25

7 usag resign fedsoc scalia clerk; HE THREATENED THEM?!

'Brazen criminality': Allegations of 'quid pro quo' fly after border czar’s admission

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note 6? 25 2 Bove doj fuck the courts,2 whistleblowers ignored by GoP in confirmation?

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Tom Homan, a top White House advisor to Donald Trump on matters concerning border security and immigration, appears to have been skipped over for a typical background check while he was under an FBI investigation for bribery, according to an MS NOW report from Tuesday.

Earlier this year, a report found that Homan, who previously served as an acting director for ICE early in the first Trump administration, had been recorded in September 2024 accepting a restaurant to-go bag filled with $50,000 from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives. The understanding was that Homan was soliciting a bribe in exchange for helping them receive government contracts if Trump were reelected.

According to the new report from MS NOW, "a small group of career lawyers at the Justice Department" were compelled to get this information to Trump's transition team following the 2024 election, believing it could "head off potential embarrassment and a security clearance problem before Trump picked his future Cabinet and top appointees." Trump announced on Nov. 10, just a few days after his reelection, that he would be appointing Homan as his "border czar," an informal but highly placed advisory role in the White House.

"Justice officials felt sure Homan would not be able to obtain a security clearance based on the evidence gathered in the corruption probe, which they and FBI agents believed had shown Homan unsuitable for a trusted senior role in government service, according to the sources," MS NOW's report explained.

Despite this, Trump's resistance to submitting names to the FBI for background checks appears to have stalled these efforts. Trump did not agree to provide a list of potential appointees until Dec. 3, nearly a month after the election and much later than has typical for incoming administrations. This list was not complete, however, containing only "picks who required Senate confirmation and a few other members of agency landing teams," meaning it did not include Homan.

According to MS NOW, the "bombshell" revelation about Homan's bribery probe did not reach Emil Bove, a member of Trump's personal legal team who eventually served as acting deputy attorney general at the start of his second term, until "very late in Trump’s process of shaping the future administration," as the concerned DOJ staffers had to wait until he was formally appointed to a post transition team post. Despite this information, Homan was able to obtain a security clearance, and it's unclear if the probe had any impact at all.

"It remains unclear how Homan was eventually granted a security clearance, or whom Bove alerted after being briefed on the Homan probe," MS NOW's report explained.

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RWW

07/30/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Bove has been accused of engaging in deception in order to carry out Trump’s agenda.

White supremacists are (once again) attempting to build a whites-only community, this time in Arkansas. Known as Return to the Land, this private membership association advertises itself as a community for “traditional views and European ancestry.” On Monday, Christian nationalists Joel Webbon and Wesley Todd interviewed the group’s co-founder, Eric Orwoll, and defended their plan.

Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters had an interesting response to being investigated for accidentally playing porn at work.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer keeps exercising enormous influence over Team Trump, successfully lobbying for firings across multiple agencies.

The administration still has FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino’s extreme social-media posting habit to rely on as a way to get the faithful back in line.

On this week’s “More To The Story,” religious scholar and TikTok star Dan McClellan examines how some Christian nationalists use—and often abuse—the Bible to gain political power.

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A scheduled vote to advance the nomination of judicial nominee Emil Bove will have to wait, due to Republicans failing to have enough senators present.

That's according to Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio, who tweeted Tuesday that Republicans are unable to hold the vote due to "GOP attendance issues." Desiderio reported that Sens. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) missed previous votes on Tuesday, and Vice President JD Vance is out of town and unable to step in to cast a tie-breaking vote.

Because Republicans have only a 53-47 majority in the U.S. Senate, they can only afford to lose three members on a given vote if they hope to have Vance break the tie, but can only lose two on any vote if Vance is unavailable. And because Bove is a particularly controversial appointee, it's unlikely any Democrats would miss the vote or side with Republicans.

READ MORE:'Deserves more blame': Historian reveals why Trump is in a 'deeply structural bind'

Democrats are deeply opposed to Bove's nomination to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals for a number of reasons. As a top DOJ official, Bove was behind the dropping of federal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams for allegedly taking bribes from Turkish government officials. Bove was also behind the mass firings of DOJ prosecutors who worked cases involving participants in the deadly January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

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However, the chief reason Democrats want to prevent Bove's confirmation involves the accusations of a DOJ whistleblower who said President Donald Trump's high-profile judicial appointee instructed agency employees to disregard a federal judge's order. Former DOJ attorney Erez Reuvini said Bove advised the department to tell the courts "f--- you" in response to efforts to halt Trump's deportations of undocumented immigrants to an El Salvador mega-prison earlier this year.

If confirmed, the 44 year-old Bove would sit on the 3rd Circuit for the rest of his life, with jurisdiction over federal district courts in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And as a circuit court judge, Bove would be just one step away from the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), whose members typically come from various circuit appellate courts across the country. Trump-appointed SCOTUS Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh came from the 7th, 10th and D.C. Circuits, respectively.

Click here to read Desiderio's initial report.

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sen grill kickass? i do not remember

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Old Man Chuck Grassley Got Snookered by Emil Bove’s Contemptuous Dodge

July 15, 2025/26 Comments/in emptywheel /by emptywheel

Senate Judiciary Democrats asked Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing with whistleblower Erez Reuveni to learn about Emil Bove’s contempt in the face of orders Judge James Boasberg gave DOJ on March 15. In a letter that carefully dodges smoking gun proof that Emil Bove did command others to blow off Boasberg’s order, Grassley refused.

I’m going to assume that Chuck Grassley is just really old and so vulnerable to being duped by someone devious like Bove. Otherwise, of course, we’d have to conclude he’s complicit in a clear attempt to deport innocent men to a concentration camp at all costs.

Grassley’s three main rebuttals of Reuveni’s allegations are:

Grassley pretends that the files handed over by Reuveni include “almost none” that “include, reference, or even cite” Bove.

Almost none of the additional documents you published include, reference, or even cite Mr. Bove.

Almost none is not none, as I’ll show below.

Grassley further claims that most of the files reflect “litigation strategy about the scope of court orders.”

Most of the communications merely reflect Administration attorneys internally debating or discussing litigation strategy and the scope of court orders. Debate about the scope of court orders is fundamentally inconsistent with an intention to ignore them. Moreover, many of the legal positions discussed in the documents were ultimately advanced in federal court as the formal position of the United States, and the Administration has received at least some appellate relief in each of the cases described.

With regards to the JGG lawsuit to which the “fuck you” comment is pertinent, that relief consists of two Trump appointees stalling a contempt motion for months, as both TPM and NYT pointed out today. Here’s how TPM’s David Kurtz described it.

The DC appeals court — a three-judge panel composed of Trump appointees Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao and Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard (who opposed the move) — placed an administrative stay on Boasberg’s contempt proceedings way back on April 18. What is usually supposed to be a short-term pause in the case has now dragged on for nearly three months.

In that time, former DOJ career lawyer Erez Reuveni has revealed bombshell internal DOJ emails and texts. Those documents show that Bove, in his role as principal associate deputy attorney general, gave the green light for continuing with the March 15 removals of Venezuelan nationals to CECOT in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act in spite of Boasberg’s order blocking the deportations and directing the planes carrying the detainees to turn around. (For his part, Bove denies violating any court orders, and the Justice Department has made the preposterous argument that Boasberg’s written order didn’t include the direction to turn the planes around and that trumped his oral demand that they do so.)

In slow-rolling the contempt inquiry, the DC appeals court hasn’t just enabled Bove (who has engaged in other egregious conduct at DOJ). It has hung Boasberg out to dry, done nothing to staunch the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of court orders in other cases, and has left the judicial branch more exposed to a rogue executive determined to expand his power at the expense of the judiciary.

The relief Grassley is relying on is, in fact, partisan stonewalling.

That matters, because he is replicating a corrupt dodge that Bove — and DOJ itself — are both adopting.

That corrupt dodge starts, first of all, with his claim that Reuveni’s “fuck you” allegation — corroborated in four sets of texts exchanged with colleagues during the weekend in question — came before any judge had issued orders.

The gravamen of the allegations is that Mr. Bove directed Justice Department attorneys to ignore court orders, but (1) the meeting with Mr. Bove occurred before there was any litigation or court order to follow;

That’s true: Bove made the “fuck you” comment at a meeting on March 14. Boasberg issued the order not to unload any planes with Alien Enemies Act detainees on the evening of March 15.

Grassley makes much of the fact that August Flentje told DOJ HR that Bove told the lawyers to avoid an order prohibiting the AEA flights at all costs.

In an April 8th letter addressed to the Justice Department’s Human Resources Division, August Flentje—Mr. Reuveni’s former supervisor—stated: “The Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General [Bove] advised our team that we must avoid a court order halting an upcoming operation to implement the Act at all costs.”1 This statement was made under penalty of perjury months before Mr. Reuveni made the claims in his whistleblower disclosure, and directly contradicts his assertions. Mr. Bove’s comments to subordinate Justice Department litigators— made in advance of anticipated litigation—advising them to avoid a court order that would negatively impact a mission is inconsistent with instructions to ignore a court order, and entirely consistent with Mr. Bove’s sworn testimony.

But again, that was March 14.

They didn’t avoid an order prohibiting the operation. Drew Ensign tried his damndest to mislead Boasberg about flights in the air, but Boasberg nevertheless issued the order.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to turn the planes around, not to deplane the planes.

So, Mr. Ensign, the first point is that I — that you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States. However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

Boasberg did give the order that Emil Bove was so inexplicably desperate to avoid.

And that’s where Grassley gets either cute or duped. He quotes Bove stating, under oath, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order” (with equivocal comments, not under oath, from Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi).

At his hearing, under oath, Mr. Bove firmly stated, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.” The Deputy Attorney General issued a statement confirming that he also attended the meeting, and “at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.” In another statement, the Attorney General unequivocally said that “no one was ever asked to defy a court order.”

All very nifty, Senator, except when you consider the smoking gun that does name Bove by his title, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Yaakov Roth, a top Civil Division lawyer documented in an email to Reuveni and others that PADAG (Bove) “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior [sic] the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court’s order.”

Only it wasn’t.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to inform its clients to turn the flights around, not to deplane the planes.

And then Bove instructed DHS — not DOJ lawyers, but DHS personnel, possibly including lawyers — something different.

Bove instructed DHS they could do something impermissible under the order Boasberg gave. And that’s the core of the contempt for which Boasberg found probable cause that two Trump appointees have bottled up at DC Circuit.

By mid-Sunday morning, the picture of what had happened the previous night came into clearer focus. It appeared that the Government had transferred members of the Plaintiff class into El Salvador’s custody hours after this Court’s injunction prohibited their deportation under the Proclamation. Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully. The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: “Oopsie . . . Too late 😂😂.” Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele), X (Mar. 16, 2025, 7:46 a.m. EDT), https://perma.cc/Y384-4TDW, https://perma.cc/6VTW-5KRD (ellipses in original)

Bove may not have lied — this is not proof he told DOJ lawyers to fuck off a Boasberg order. But he did tell DHS to fuck off a Boasberg order.

Which is it, Senator Grassley: Are you old and confused? Or complicit?

Because Erez Reuveni supplied you the smoking gun proving that Bove blew off Boasberg’s order.

Grassley does one other dishonest thing in his letter. He makes much of the fact that Todd Blanche, not Bove himself, fired Reuveni.

The whistleblower also claims his termination was the result of his efforts to ensure agency compliance with court orders. The documents Mr. Reuveni produced, however, reveal that the ultimate termination decision was made and signed by Deputy Attorney General Blanche—not Mr. Bove.

Another of the “almost none” documents that Reuveni turned over showed that Bove was gunning for Reuveni just before he was ousted.

Days before Blanche put Reuveni on leave, April 1, Flentje texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove” conveyed by Roth, the same guy who sent the smoking gun email.

On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche did put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”

That is, in response to Reuveni being placed on leave, Flentje confirmed there was a “through line” from questions about whether or not DOJ would follow an order to Reuveni’s suspension (and subsequent firing).

For Grassley, “almost none” is two too many to sustain his case, because the smoking gun documenting who defied an order after Bove proclaimed he might tell a judge “fuck you” is right there with Bove’s title on it.

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Tags: Chuck Grassley, Emil Bove, Erez Reuveni, James Boasberg

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rww

06/26/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

The Republican justices just nuked much of federal Medicaid law, in order to spite Planned Parenthood.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attempted to bully journalists for covering the leaked Iran strikes report.

Perhaps the most dire prediction right-wingers made in the first 15 years of this century was that legalizing marriage between two people of the same sex would end civilization. No less than the pope warned that humankind was in peril because of countries legalizing marriage.

Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who plotted to use fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election on behalf of President Donald Trump, was disbarred in the state of New York this week.

Once it became apparent that New York state Rep. Zohran Mamdani was the presumptive winner of New York City’s mayoral primary, right-wing figures went into full-blown hysterics. But few could top the meltdown from self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer, who claimed that Mamdani will support firebombing synagogues and murdering the rich — including President Trump.

The U.S. appeals court nominee claimed it is “political” to say Biden got the majority of votes and Electoral College votes to become president.

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Politico reports the rift between President Donald Trump and the Federalist Society is growing with Trump’s nomination of his personal criminal defense attorney Emil Bove to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Up until recently, the alliance between Trump and the conservative legal community helped the president stock the judiciary with Federalist Society judges who handed him sweeping wins at the Supreme Court, from presidential immunity to abortion and affirmative action.

But Politico reports Trump appeared to declare 'civil war' on the Federalist Society after one of his first-term appointees ruled against him in a major challenge to his tariffs. Trump responded with a public tirade against the former chair of the group, Leonard Leo, who Trump called a “sleazebag” who “probably hates America” before blaming the group for “bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations.”

READ MORE: Trump's 'disturbing and unethical' new rule allows discrimination against Dems and single women

Trump is now aggravating the growing fissure with the nomination of Bove, a Trump enforcer at the Justice Department. Foremost members of the conservative legal movement argue Bove would be more loyal to Trump than the rule of law.

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“His involvement in the [New York Mayor Eric] Adams prosecution is really troubling, and it suggests someone who’s eager to do the bidding of his political masters before seriously looking at legal constraints and ethics,” said Gregg Nunziata, a Federalist Society member who once served as a senior aide to Senate Republicans on judicial nominations.

Politico reports Bove was responsible for dismissing the criminal case against Adams using arguments that were — according to the presiding judge — “unsupported by any objective evidence,” “pretextual” and “unsubstantiated.” Trump appears to have given Adams a pass in order to ensure the mayor’s support for the administration’s immigration crackdown in New York, or perhaps for petty rivalry against the Biden Justice Department, which brought the corruption charges against Adams.

Trump praises Bove as a MAGA foot soldier, claiming “Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and … will … restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

READ MORE:The Trump administration just accidentally made the case against the Big Beautiful Bill

In that effort Bove dismissed or transferred DOJ career officials and assembled a hit list of FBI agents who had worked on the prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters.

Politico reporter Ankush Khardori argues that the conservative legal establishment that supported Trump’s ascendance is in a position to hamper Trump’s future political appointees, but he added they may end up learning a lesson that “Trump will use you when it suits him, then toss you aside, and perhaps even run you over, the moment you become an impediment to his objectives.”

“You can go from ally to adversary in the blink of an eye,” said Khardori, a former prosecutor. “You can disavow Trump all you want, but you cannot wipe the historical record or abandon your responsibility for what happened in the meantime — or for what comes in the future as a result of your past support. In the law, we call this'but-for' causation."

He added that the winner of this conflict will likely be determined by whether or not Senate Republicans “fall in line on Bove and confirm him, as they have with virtually every other Trump appointment in his second term.”

READ MORE: OK Republican says folks are 'going crazy' over GOP Medicaid plans — but it's not in a good way

Read the full Politico report at this link.

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RWW

05/20/2025

by

Peter Montgomery

*Commentary

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering naming Emil Bove, a personal attorney and enforcer, as a judge on a circuit court of appeals – just one step below the Supreme Court. Bove has been described by the New York Times as “the main enforcer of President Trump’s demands for retribution and unimpeded control of federal law enforcement.” Making Bove a federal judge would be a major threat to the rule of law, perhaps the strongest sign yet of Trump’s contempt for the federal courts’ role as a constitutional check on his abuses of power.

Before Trump returned to office this year, Bove served as one of his criminal defense lawyers. When it became clear that he and other Trump attorneys would be granted top positions in the administration, hard-right judicial activist Mike Davis declared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that Bove and others would be “savages” in the Justice Department, not “FedSoc cucks turning the other cheek.”

Bove hasn’t disappointed the MAGA hardliners. Since taking a top Justice Department position, Bove oversaw a purge of Justice Department and FBI officials who had been involved in investigating and prosecuting people who took part in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Among other things, Bove has:

Rep. Jamie Raskin called the targeting of Jan. 6 prosecutors and FBI agents a "repulsive affront to the rule of law."

Sen. Adam Schiff criticized Bove’s purge, saying the prosecutors were fired not for corruption or misconduct but “for failing what is, in effect, a loyalty test.” Schiff wrote, “The lawbreakers get pardoned. And the brave FBI agents who tracked down these violent miscreants, these agents get punished. They get fired. They get purged.”

In another sign that Bove is more than willing to sacrifice the rule of law to advance Trump’s agenda, Bove ordered deputy attorney general Danielle Sassoon to dismiss the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in February. The move was widely seen, even by some conservatives, as a corrupt quid pro quo to secure Adams’ cooperation to Trump administration anti-immigrant policies.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin and other Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee signed a complaint against Bove with the New York State bar, writing that “Mr. Bove’s conduct not only speaks to his fitness as a lawyer; his activities are part of a broader course of conduct by President Trump and his allies to undermine the traditional independence of Department of Justice’s investigations and prosecutions and the rule of law.” Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse and Richard Blumenthal also filed complaints with the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

Before going into private practice and becoming Trump’s criminal defense attorney, Bove worked at the U.S. attorney’s office in Southern Manhattan, where he reportedly had a reputation as an abusive and bullying manager who alienated and demeaned prosecutors and who generated a complaint from a group of defense attorneys who “believed Bove had deployed questionable tactics, including threatening defendants with increasingly severe charges the lawyers believed he couldn’t prove,” Politico reported. Vanity Fair quoted one defense attorney who described Bove as “the perfect fucking hatchet man.”

Trump has been raging against judges and Supreme Court justices who require him to follow the law and Constitution. Bove being considered for a circuit court position makes it clear that, like his cabinet picks, Trump’s second-term judicial nominees will be more extreme than those in his first term, threatening the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law, and turning the courts into one more weapon for the would-be king to wield against his personal and political enemies.

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SEE ED MARTIN BASED ON VERITAS bs

TPM

A federal prosecutor in charge of the criminal division in the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office resigned on Tuesday following her refusal to follow a Donald Trump administration directive to freeze assets of a Biden-era administration grant initiative, the Washington Post and Reuters reported.

The resignation is the latest of several similar resignations and dismissals at the Justice Department in recent days and the most recent example of a DOJ career prosecutor resigning to resist improper political interference from the Trump administration. The resignation highlights the ongoing erosion of Justice Department independence from the White House under Trump.

Denise Cheung reportedly refused an order from Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove and interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin to launch an investigation into the Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency funding decisions. Details are still unfolding, but specifically, the resignation is connected to the Justice Department’s recent effort to assist EPA administrator Lee Zeldin’s push to rescind $20 billion in grants already awarded by the Biden administration to fund climate projects.

VERITAS BS The former New York congressman and current EPA administrator posted a video on Twitter last week claiming, without evidence, that the Biden administration had improperly doled out the grants before the former president left office. In the video, Zeldin announced his plans to refer the matter to the inspector general’s office and to work with the DOJ on clawing back the money and contracts tied to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. DOJ has the authority to freeze assets but only after it has found evidence that the funds are tied to criminal activity, according to the Post.

Cheung and Martin reportedly disagreed about “whether she was delaying efforts to order a financial institution to halt spending transfers pending further investigation, or seeking to reach a compromise by taking steps she believed were ethical and appropriate,” in the Washington Post’s words.

In an email to colleagues, obtained by the Post, Cheung did not specify her reason for resigning. “I took an oath of office to support and defend the Constitution, and I have executed this duty faithfully,” the email reads.

In a letter offering her resignation to Martin, Cheung reportedly made it clear she was resigning due to the improper request from the Trump administration, Reuters reported.

Per Reuters:

In a letter to the interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin reviewed by Reuters, the office’s criminal chief Denise Cheung wrote that the Trump administration had ordered her to investigate a government contract awarded during Joe Biden’s administration and pursue a freeze of the recipient’s assets.

She said that neither request was supported by the evidence, which she said she was provided with by the Deputy Attorney General’s office.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department responded to TPM’s request for comment.

Cheung’s resignation comes only one day after President Donald Trump announced the nomination of Martin to permanently head the D.C. US Attorney’s office. His chances of being confirmed in the Senate are unclear.

Martin, who has been a face of the ‘Stop the Steal Movement’ also has a long history of January 6 denialism and has defended January 6 rioters in court. Martin had tasked Cheung and another prosecutor with investigating how January 6 prosecutors charged rioters from that day.

Cheung’s resignation comes against the backdrop of recent resignations of federal prosecutors who refused to comply with orders from acting deputy AG Bove, to dismiss the criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

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2 11 25 kash busted for lying in confirm for working on purge

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talk min Bove led the prosecution of two of Maduro's nephews

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emil Joseph Bove III (born c. 1982) is an American attorney and is the acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General. He is a former assistant United States Attorney and was a member of Donald Trump's legal defense team.

Early life and education

Bove is from Seneca Falls, New York. His father, Emil Bove Jr., is a retired assistant New York attorney general.[1]

Bove graduated from Mynderse Academy as his class salutatorian.[2][3] Bove attended the University at Albany, SUNY. He was captain of the Albany Great Danes men's lacrosse team. Bove was named the America East Conference Male Scholar Athlete Award for 2002–2003.[4] He graduated in 2003 with a bachelor's degree in public policy and economics summa cum laude.[2][5] Bove attended the Georgetown University School of Law, earning his Juris Doctor in 2008.[2]

Legal career

After graduating from law school, Bove clerked for Richard J. Sullivan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2008 and 2009[1] and for Richard C. Wesley of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2010.[6]

:{Bove worked as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell before becoming an assistant US Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he served as the co-chief of the national security and international narcotics unit.[7][8] While there, he led the unit's prosecutions of Nicolás Maduro,[9] Cesar Sayoc,[10] Tony Hernández,[11] and Fabio Lobo.[12] Bove left the office in 2022 to work in the private sector.[8]

He became a partner at Blanche Law, the law firm established by Todd Blanche.[5] Donald Trump added Bove to his defense team in September 2023.[13] Bove and Blanche represented Trump in his election obstruction case,[14] classified documents case,[15] and falsification of business records case.[16]}:

After winning the 2024 United States presidential election, Trump announced that he would nominate Bove to serve as principal associate deputy attorney general.[17][18]

Acting Deputy Attorney General

As acting deputy attorney general, Bove managed day-to-day operations for the Department of Justice's workforce of over 110,000 employees while awaiting Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as Deputy Attorney General.[19]

On his second day in office, January 21, 2025, Bove instructed federal prosecutors to investigate local officials who declined to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. He subsequently initiated an investigation of an upstate New York sheriff regarding the alleged release of an undocumented immigrant. On January 26, he traveled to Chicago to witness a migrant arrest by U.S. officers, a rare undertaking for a senior Justice Department official.[19]

On January 31, 2025, as part of the ongoing purge of civil servants in the second Trump administration, Bove ordered the FBI to fire eight senior executives and compile a list of potentially thousands of other employees involved in investigations stemming from the January 6 United States Capitol attack.[20][21][22] Former prosecutors Joyce Vance and Andrew Weissmann have raised concerns that firing career agents because of their perceived disloyalty or involvement in January 6 investigations would be illegal.[23][24]

The reaction within the FBI to Bove's order was intensely negative, with current and former agents saying the "purge at the bureau has had a shattering effect on the morale, sending a message that agents who work on cases that anger someone in the Trump administration could be targeted."[23] Acting FBI director Brian Driscoll, who was appointed to that role during the first Trump administration, refused to endorse the effort to purge agents and pushed back "so forcefully that some FBI officials feared he would be dismissed."[20][23] Driscoll was lauded in a message widely circulated among FBI personnel.[23] In addition, the agent in charge of the FBI's New York field office circulated an email to staff praising Driscoll and acting deputy director Robert Kissane for "fighting" for the Bureau's employees and said: "[W]e find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy."[25]

On February 5, 2025, Bove distributed a memo to the FBI workforce accusing bureau leadership of "insubordination" for refusing to identify Washington, D.C.-based agents who had overseen the January 6 investigation. When leadership declined to identify what Bove called the "core team," he expanded his directive to include all agents and employees who had participated in January 6-related matters.[26] This broader mandate prompted significant opposition within the FBI, resulting in non-compliance discussions and legal challenges from both individual agents and the FBI Agents Association. In the memo, Bove addressed these concerns, stating that "No FBI employee who simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner with respect to January 6 investigations is at risk of termination or other penalties," while specifying that consequences would apply only to those who had "acted with corrupt or partisan intent" or engaged in "weaponizing the FBI".[26][27] His initiative to identify the alleged wrongdoers is called the Weaponization Working Group.[28]

The directive instructed thousands of FBI employees involved in January 6-related investigations to submit detailed questionnaires about their roles in the inquiries. In response, FBI employees filed two lawsuits on February 4 seeking to block the collection and potential dissemination of investigators' names.[27] This review process departed from standard practice, as rank-and-file agents traditionally neither choose their case assignments nor face discipline for working on politically sensitive matters.[27]

Personal life

In 2012, Bove married Sarah Kwai Lin Samis.[1]

References

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an 2 25

One of the officials leading the hunt for prosecutors involved in investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol previously oversaw some of the cases himself. In a report published Tuesday, retired FBI official Christopher O’Leary told SpyTalk’s Michael Isikoff the development was “outrageous.”

Acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the FBI to provide names of those who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation, but “he should have started by acknowledging his own role,” the Daily Beast’s Michael Daly reported earlier this month. As co-chief counter-terrorism prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove participated in meetings of the FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force, where attendees discussed Jan. 6.

“In short, Bove was asking for the identities of agents who worked on some of the same cases that he himself oversaw,” Isikoff writes.

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O’Leary was deputy chief of the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the time, working to find those who participated in Jan. 6. “It’s outrageous that he is going to turn on the people that were his teammates just a few years ago,” O’Leary told the SpyTalk podcast. “I [have spoken] to agents and detectives non-stop for the last week and a half, and they feel betrayed.”

“If he had any concern, any objection,” about the Jan. 6 investigations, “he never voiced it,” O’Leary said.

“If he witnessed any violation of due process or any violation by an FBI agent or task force officer,” he would have needed to report it, “none of which was done," the former official noted.

“People are just going to leave,” O’Leary said. “So anybody who's eligible for retirement probably will just leave, right? Just out of self-protection. They'll raise their hand, they'll take their retirement, and they'll try to get out before something happens to them or before they're fired overnight, which is what happened to some of the senior leaders.

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“But if you go further down, [and] you can see your retirement and your pension within your sights, more junior agents may go as well," he continued. "Because if it's a coercive environment where you can't do your job, where you could be facing punitive action for just doing your job at any point in your career, well, it might not be the place or the culture you want to continue to commit yourself.”

“We’re in greater danger," O'Leary said of that potential outcome.

*Read the full report at SkyTalk.

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