Bove Blasts ‘Wildly Inaccurate’ Media Smear in Nomination Hearing

The coordination between the propaganda press and Senate Democrats was pitifully obvious on Wednesday during Emil J. Bove III’s judicial confirmation hearing. The New York Times teed up a perfectly timed hit piece that ran a day before the hearing. Then Democrats used it to make numerous desperate swings at Bove. He anticipated their questions and started answering, right from his opening statement.

“I am someone who tries to stand up for what I believe is right,” Bove said. “I’m not afraid to make difficult decisions. I understand that some of those decisions have generated controversy. … I want to be clear about one thing up front: There is a wildly inaccurate caricature of me in the mainstream media. I am not anybody’s henchman. I’m not an enforcer. I’m a lawyer from a small town who never expected to be in an arena like this.”

The NYT framed its hit piece around a last-minute, 27-page letter sent on June 24 by attorneys of the left-wing nonprofit Government Accountability Project, on behalf of disgruntled former Department of Justice employee Erez Reuveni, himself an attorney. It claims that Bove suggested that the DOJ “would need to consider telling the courts ‘f-ck you’” and disregard a court order if a judge prevented President Trump from deporting plane loads of criminal aliens to a prison in El Salvador.

The conversation was purely theoretical at that point. The deportation planes had not flown yet; there was no court case, let alone a court order issued at the time, the letter detailing Reuveni’s story shows. In fact, Reuveni did not seem to take the suggestion seriously at the time.   

“Mr. Reuveni left the meeting understanding that DOJ would tell DHS to follow all court orders,” the letter reads.

But Democrats kept going back to this speculative conversation, packaged in the explosive words “whistleblower report.”

“I did not advise any justice department attorney to violate court orders,” Bove testified. “The account in that whistleblower complaint is not accurate. But even if that account is taken at face value, the whistleblower acknowledges that he left the meeting on March 14 of this year with the understanding that, of course, the department would advise clients to abide by court orders. … I don’t think there’s any validity to the suggestion that that whistleblower complaint, filed yesterday, calls into question my qualifications to serve as a circuit judge.”

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., seemed concerned about Reuveni’s tender ears, so he angrily quoted the “whistleblower” letter, asking Bove if saying, “F-ck you” to courts is the kind of thing he suggests frequently. But it appeared more like Schiff just got off on cussing in Congress. He repeated the phrase six times in his questioning.

Bove said it was a mischaracterization and he does not recall saying anything of that kind.

“I’m interested in whether you participated in the willful violation of court orders, as alleged in this complaint,” Schiff said. A senator made the assertion, and it will be repeated by the partner press, but that does not make it true. Again, there was no court order or case pending when the conversation took place.

President Donald Trump nominated Bove to be a judge on the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which handles federal appeals in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Virgin Islands. As The Federalist previously reported, the nomination was not without controversy, but Bove is a “highly qualified” judicial candidate. He has represented Trump, was acting deputy attorney general at the start of the current administration, and is currently principal associate deputy attorney general of the United States.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.