The Federal Judge at the Trump Rally

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 2src21, 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.