Hey, this guy is a judge now! Let that seep in for a bit.
Emil Bove used to work for the DOJ. Then he went to work for Trump, acting as his personal lawyer starting in 2023. Upon Trump’s return to office, he was brought back to the DOJ to serve as an “associate deputy attorney general” — a position that didn’t actually require Bove to be subjected to the Senate confirmation process.
Bove was fine with this. And being one of Trump’s guys, he decided to use this new position to aid and abet illegal activities engaged in by ICE and the DHS. It was Bove who first instructed DOJ lawyers to tell courts to “fuck themselves” when faced with rulings that demanded the administration respect the law.
It was also Emil Bove who pushed hard for the “murder people in boats” program the Trump administration has been engaged in ever since it first decided people from Central and South America needed to be killed to prevent them from eventually reaching the US border.
This show of absolute loyalty was rewarded. Emil Bove is no longer just a guy who thinks ignoring court orders and murdering people in international waters is a fine way to run a government. He’s now capable of turning an entire circuit against Americans and their rights, thanks to his installation as a Third Circuit Appeals Court judge.
There’s no reason he should be given this position. He’s entirely untrustworthy and has, at best, only a cursory relationship to the rule of law so often claimed as the high ground by Trump and his bootlickers.
There was plenty of evidence already on the record that should have blocked this nomination, but all it took to install him in a position to do serious damage to an entire nation was a unified MAGA front that could override any opposition from the Democratic Party minority in the Senate.
It doesn’t take much to get a judge installed, as Trump has repeatedly proven. It takes far, far more to remove one who is so compromised they can’t possibly be trusted. The wheels are greased and the trolley car has been directed to engage in maximum cruelty. And that’s not going to change even if more dirt on Bove emerges.
Nevertheless, we will engage with this dirt, which comes to us via a whistleblower complaint about Bove’s activities during his relatively brief tenure as a top DOJ prosecutor.
Jill Fields, a former supervisory intelligence analyst in the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, made a formal whistleblower complaint to Senate Judiciary Committee leaders over the federal response to anti-ICE protest activity around federal buildings, as well as in a residential area, early last year.
[…]
Fields says Emil Bove, then the acting deputy attorney general, told the head of the field office to open an investigation into activities outside the federal building even though, she says, the activities were protected free speech. Separately, she says the White House gave a directive to FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate a group of protesters using megaphones during immigration enforcement operations after FBI agents had conducted a check into the conduct and declined to open an investigation.
There’s no pretending this doesn’t sound exactly like something Bove would have directed and approved. After all, he was already giving his blessing to boat strikes and courtroom “fuck you’s” at this point. The whistleblower report [PDF] goes into more detail about Bove’s actions, demands, and general disregard for constitutional rights.
First, it details how FBI agents and officers were taken off task to help Trump fight his War on Los Angeles that was a vindictive offshoot of his general War on Migrants. It also details the administration’s desire to do these things while adding as little as possible to the public record.
From the very start of the second Trump administration, Ms. Fields and her colleagues at the Los Angeles Field Office were instructed by Field Office leadership, including the Assistant
Director in Charge (ADIC), the Special Agents in Charge (SACs), the Assistant Special Agents in Charge (ASACs), and the Senior Supervisory Intelligence Analysts (SSIAs), through emails and directives in meetings, to support what they called a nationwide “big immigration push” to take
place across multiple “weeks of action” that would begin in February and continue throughout the year.The initiative included assigning agents Title 8 authorities, directing intelligence analysts to conduct checks on lists of immigrants, and supporting immigration-related arrests across FBI Field Offices nationwide. During meetings on this initiative, Ms. Fields experienced supervisors encouraging her and others to not put things in writing and noticed many directives and subsequent discussions were conducted in face-to-face meetings rather than over email.
Not only were agents redirected to support the “big immigration push,” they were told not to create any written documentation of their actions in support of Trump’s bigotry.
The FBI no longer served the public or the ideal of public safety. What FBI agents in the Los Angeles area were instructed to do was make their superiors look good in front of the boss.
[A]gents were pulled off active cartel cases to satisfy what her supervisor, , described as “optics” designed to “make a show for the president.”
Meanwhile, ICE and DHS were busy making themselves look worse. Whatever wasn’t an obvious lie about the situation in Los Angeles was a series of “boots on the ground” debacles that failed to produces the thousands of migrant arrests the administration had already told its voting base were all but inevitable.
Either Bove sensed some impending displeasure or was just a hideous human being who should never have been allowed to become a judge. Whatever the case, Bove — while still holding a position as a top DOJ prosecutor — directed the FBI to start investigating peaceful protesters simply because they were protesting the government that now employed him.
In late January or early February 2025, shortly before a standing 4:00 pm Pacific Timemeeting including SACs, ASACs, SSIAs, and the Los Angeles Criminal Program’s Mission Support Analyst regarding the immigration push, [redacted] came to Ms. Fields’s office, shut the door, and informed her that Department of Justice (DOJ) former Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove had instructed Akil Davis, the ADIC of the Los Angeles FBI Field Office, to open an investigation into any anti-ICE and CBP protesters demonstrating at federal buildings in Los Angeles.
The FBI knows constitutionally protected activity can never form the basis for an investigation. And it ignores this knowledge with alarming regularity. But this is Trump’s DOJ, which not only spends most of its time satisfying his bigotry and revenge fantasies, but also hasn’t met a right it doesn’t feel comfortable violating (Second Amendment excluded).
That Bove would be the lapdog Trump wants to see in the world is unsurprising. What is surprising is that an agent would actually file a whistleblower report while overseen by an administration that has been rooting out dissent since day one, and would gladly hang any dissenter if it didn’t have to hammer out a contract with Dana White first. Anyone who isn’t a loyalist will soon be unemployed. And those who dare to peep above the parapet will be the first against the wall.
This report is essential. But it’s being handed to people who can’t do anything about it and raises issues the current administration views as features, rather than bugs. And it certainly won’t get Bove booted back to where he should be: just another Trump lawyer wondering when he’s going to get paid for protecting Mr. MAGA from the consequences of his own actions.