Emil Bove Went to a Trump Rally Because He Supports Donald Trump

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held one of his trademark rallies at a casino resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. As is usually the case when Trump has a microphone and a captive audience, he spent most of the night delivering a campaign-style stump speech peppered with references to everything he hates: President Joe Biden (“a sleepy son-of-a-bitch who destroyed our country”), Representative Ilhan Omar (“whatever the hell her name is, with her little turban”), Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (“one of the dumbest governors ever in our history”), and Haiti, Somalia, and other countries where people are not white (“shithole countries…filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime”).

At one point, Trump jokingly acknowledged that he’d wandered a good distance from the topic he’d planned to address, which was “how he plans to continue to bring down prices,” according to the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s announcement. “I haven’t read practically anything off this stupid teleprompter,” Trump told the crowd, reassuring his concerned supporters that he has no trouble remembering how to do off-the-cuff racism in public. 

Trump’s rally, in other words, was not the sort of thing that a typical federal judge would choose to attend. But Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and Department of Justice fixer whom Trump promoted to the Third Circuit earlier this year, is not a typical federal judge. And when MS NOW spotted Bove in the audience on Tuesday and asked what he was doing there, Bove responded, “Just here as a citizen coming to watch the president speak.”

The code of conduct for federal judges prohibits them from engaging in “political activity,” which includes “attend[ing]” an “event sponsored by a political organization or candidate.” The code also generally requires judges to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” But you do not have to be familiar with the intricacies of ethics canons to understand how ludicrous it is for a federal judge to fanboy out at a reactionary hoedown emceed by the president who appointed him.

It is alarming that Trump has spent his second term in office doling out judicial appointments to servile bootlickers. It might be more alarming that even after getting the promotions they wanted, these people are still so smitten with Trump that their idea of fun is spending a few hours on a weeknight taking in his xenophobic vaudeville show in person.

Even the people whose job duties include offering knee-jerk public defenses of Trump judges had trouble explaining away this little ethical misadventure. Robert Luther, a Scalia Law professor who worked in the first Trump administration, suggested to Bloomberg that Bove’s “private, quiet personal attendance” at a Trump rally was an aspect of “participating in civic life” that is not “any different from voting,” an analogy which raises the possibility that Luther, an adult man, has no idea how voting works. 

Luther also asserted that the fact that Trump, as a term-limited president, is not a “candidate” for political office makes the code of conduct’s restrictions irrelevant in this case. This is wrong under the plain text of the canon, which lists specific prohibitions related to judges’ involvement with “candidates” and also provides that judges “should not engage in any other political activity,” either. Setting aside that detail, Luther’s argument might be more persuasive if, during his rally speech on Tuesday, Trump hadn’t said, “You see the new hat? We have four more years, 2028,” and then stood there soaking in the enthusiastic “four more years” chants that followed:

In the year-plus since Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Bove has repeatedly demonstrated his belief that laws and rules do not apply to him. Whistleblowers have alleged that Bove was involved in an oafishly corrupt deal to drop criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’s cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. These whistleblowers should not be confused with the whistleblowers who have asserted that Bove told his Department of Justice colleagues that if federal judges interfered with the Trump administration’s efforts to disappear noncitizens to foreign megaprisons, the Trump administration should be prepared to tell the courts “fuck you” in response.

Last month, as the White House continued its practice of blowing alleged drug traffickers out of the water without notice or process, NPR reported that Bove, during his stint as an official in the Department of Justice, had suggested that law enforcement skip the hassle of making arrests at sea and instead “just sink the boats.” In Bove, Trump found everything he wants in a life-tenured federal judge: a guy who is as contemptuous of the law as Trump is, and who also does not care what anyone else thinks.

For as long as they remain in the minority in the House and Senate, there is little Democrats can do about the national humiliation that is Bove’s continued presence within the federal judiciary. Should they retake the House and Senate next fall, though, they would earn the power to conduct meaningful oversight of Bove, up to and including impeaching him and removing him from office. At this point, the question is no longer whether Democrats should do so; the question is which grounds for impeachment and removal Democrats should list first.