FILE - Emil Bove, attorney for then former President Donald Trump, attends Manhattan criminal court during Trump's sentencing in the hush money case in New York, Jan. 10, 2025. (Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg via AP, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — A top Justice Department official nominated to become a federal appeals court judge said Wednesday that he never told department attorneys to ignore court orders, denying the account of a whistleblower who detailed a campaign to defy judges to carry out President Donald Trump's deportation plans.

Emil Bove, a former criminal defense attorney for the Republican president, forcefully pushed back against suggestions from Democrats that the whistleblower's claims make him unfit to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bove's nomination has come under intense scrutiny after the whistleblower, a fired department lawyer, claimed in a complaint made public Tuesday that Bove used an expletive when he said during a meeting that the Trump administration might need to ignore judicial commands.

“I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order,” Bove told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. He added: “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.”

Bove was nominated last month by Trump to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was on the defense team during Trump’s New York hush money trial and defended Trump in the two federal criminal cases brought by the Justice Department.

The White House said Bove "is unquestionably qualified for the role and has a career filled with accolades, both academically and throughout his legal career, that should make him a shoo-in for the Third Circuit.”

"The President is committed to nominating constitutionalists to the bench who will restore law and order and end the weaponization of the justice system, and Emil Bove fits that mold perfectly,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.

The whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, was fired in April after conceding in court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who had been living in Maryland, was mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison. Reuveni sent a letter on Tuesday to members of Congress and the Justice Department's inspector general seeking an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing by Bove and other officials in the weeks leading up to his firing.

Reuveni described a Justice Department meeting in March concerning Trump’s plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act over what the president claimed was an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Reuveni says Bove raised the possibility that a court might block the deportations before they could happen. Reuveni claims Bove used a profanity in saying the department would need to consider telling the courts what to do and “ignore any such order,” Reuveni's lawyers said in the letter.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche called the allegations “utterly false,” saying that he was at the March meeting and “at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.”

“Planting a false hit piece the day before a confirmation hearing is something we have come to expect from the media, but it does not mean it should be tolerated,” Blanche wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.

Bove has been at the center of other moves that have roiled the Justice Department in recent months, including the order to dismiss New York City Mayor Eric Adams' federal corruption case. Bove's order prompted the resignation of several Justice Department officials, including Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, who accused the department of acceding to a quid pro quo — dropping the case to ensure Adams’ help with Trump’s immigration agenda.

News from © The Associated Press, 2025