The Federal Judge at the Trump Rally
This article features Government Accountability Project whistleblower client, Erez Reuveni, and was originally published here.
President Trump kicked off his campaigning for the midterm elections on Tuesday night, in a ballroom at the Mt. Airy Casino Resort, in the Poconos. He introduced the Pennsylvania senator David McCormick. (“He’s here again, as usual. I can’t get rid of this guy.”) He introduced his Treasury Secretary (“the great Scott Bessent”); his Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright (“He can put his nose in the ground and tell you whether or not there’s oil”); and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles (“Susie Trump, do you know Susie Trump? Sometimes referred to as Susie Wiles”). There was one luminary in the audience whose presence went unmentioned: Emil Bove III, formerly Trump’s personal criminal-defense lawyer, then a senior official in the second-term Trump Justice Department and, since September, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
It is an eighty-mile drive from Bove’s judicial chambers, in Newark, N.J., to the Mt. Airy casino. When a reporter noticed Bove sitting in the third row and asked what he was doing there, Bove responded, “Just here as a citizen coming to watch the President speak.” But Bove is not just any citizen—he is a federal judge with lifetime tenure and, with that, a set of ethical obligations. To become a judge is to agree to refrain from activities that you were previously free to engage in—from letting old friends buy you lunch to putting political lawn signs in your yard—as encapsulated in the “Code of Conduct for United States Judges.” The official commentary on the rules explains, “A judge must expect to be the subject of constant public scrutiny and accept freely and willingly restrictions that might be viewed as burdensome by the ordinary citizen.” Canon 5 of the code specifically admonishes judges to “refrain from political activity.” Canon 2 more generally instructs them to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.”
The MS now reporter Vaughn Hillyard observed that Bove’s appearance at the resort was “an unusual move.” That’s a dramatic understatement. It is normal and appropriate for a President to nominate a political ally or an administration official to a judgeship. It is neither normal nor appropriate for that individual—or any federal judge, for that matter—to attend an unambiguously political event. The President, of course, gives the State of the Union address, which Supreme Court Justices attend as a matter of course, and delivers other official speeches and remarks, but the State of the Union this was not. It was a campaign rally. As Trump told the crowd, Wiles had urged him to get out on the trail. “We have to start campaigning, sir,” Trump quoted Wiles as saying. “We have to win the midterms, and you’re the guy that’s going to take us over the midterms.” Attendees wore MAGA hats and waved signs that read “Lower Prices” and “Bigger Paychecks.” The President denounced his predecessor, Joe Biden, as “a sleepy son of a bitch who destroyed our country.” He lamented, “We only take people from shithole countries” that are “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” He went after the Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, of Minnesota, “whatever the hell her name is, with her little turban,” adding, of the Somali-born lawmaker, “We ought to get her the hell out.” He called Democrats “sick people” who “always have a hoax. The new word is ‘affordability.’” The crowd broke out into a chant of “Four more years.”
The day after the event, the judicial-reform group Fix the Court filed an ethics complaint against Bove, calling the rally a “highly charged, highly political event that no federal judge should have been within shouting distance of.” (When I called Bove’s chambers on Wednesday, a person who answered the phone but declined to give his name said that the judge would have no comment.) Jeremy Fogel, a former federal judge who was appointed by President Clinton, and an expert on judicial ethics, agreed. “This violated the spirit, if not the letter, of Canon 5, which is the ban on political activity, and it creates at least an appearance of a lack of impartiality,” Fogel told me. The former federal appeals-court judge J. Michael Luttig, a George H.W. Bush appointee who has emerged as a leading Trump critic, was even sharper. “I’ve never known a federal judge who would have ever attended that event,” Luttig told me. “It’s entirely inappropriate for a sitting federal judge, especially Judge Bove, given the controversial circumstances of his confirmation.”
Luttig was referring to the fact that Bove won confirmation by a single vote, with the Republican senators Susan Collins, of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, voting against him. (The Republican senator Bill Hagerty, of Tennessee, was absent.) That narrow margin reflects the fact that Bove, in his seven months in the Justice Department, emerged as one of the most divisive figures in the new Administration. In January, as the acting Deputy Attorney General, Bove ordered the firing of prosecutors who had worked on January 6th cases, saying, “I will not tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous Administration.” The next month, he instructed federal prosecutors in Manhattan, where he had worked until 2021, to drop the corruption case against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, leading to mass resignations in the Southern District and the department’s Public Integrity Section. Then, as the Senate Judiciary Committee was weighing Bove’s nomination to the Third Circuit, Erez Reuveni, who had been one of the department’s senior immigration lawyers, filed a whistle-blower complaint against him describing a meeting about Trump’s plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. According to Reuveni, Bove said that, if a federal court blocked the action, the department “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you.’” Bove told the Judiciary Committee that he did not recall making that statement—a
non-denial that proved to be enough to get him confirmed.
Bove’s attendance at Trump’s campaign rally offered proof, if any more was needed, of his lack of judicial temperament. The thick icing of irony here is that Bove’s former Administration colleagues continue their campaign of denouncing the alleged partisanship of federal judges who dare to rule against Trump. At a Federalist Society meeting last month, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Bove’s former law partner and boss, inveighed against “rogue activist judges,” three times describing the Administration’s conflict with them as a “war.” These problem judges, Blanche said, “have a robe on but they are more political or certainly as political as the most liberal governor or D.A.” The next week, his office followed up with an order that U.S. Attorneys across the country submit two to three examples of “unusual judicial system obstacles” to the Administration’s agenda. This week, Blanche and Attorney General Pam Bondi declared on X that “this Department of Justice has no tolerance for undemocratic judicial activism.” Imagine how they would respond if a Democratic-appointed judge turned up at an event headlined by a Democratic politician. They would have a point.
Bove, for his part, is not a man inclined to retreat in the face of criticism. In 2018, when he was a prosecutor for the Southern District, a group of criminal-defense lawyers were so alarmed by what they considered his abusive and high-handed behavior that they shared their concerns in an extraordinary e-mail to his supervisors. Bove’s attitude, the e-mail said, was “that he has all the power and cannot be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.” Bove, according to the Associated Press, “was hardly chastened by the complaints. Instead, he printed the email and pinned it on a cork board in his office for others to see.” Bove had a prominent seat at Trump’s recent Poconos appearance, suggesting that he was happy to be seen at the event. Was his appearance a Bovian middle finger to his critics? Was it an ostentatious display of continuing fealty to Trump? The President, for whom loyalty from subordinates is the paramount virtue, may be in the position of filling a Supreme Court vacancy as soon as this summer. It never hurts to kiss the hem.
