DOJ Whistleblower Reinforces Claim Bove Defied Court Order (1)

A Justice Department whistleblower has disclosed communications reinforcing his allegations that senior DOJ official and judicial nominee Emil Bove coordinated to defy court orders in various deportation matters.

Following up on his June 24 whistleblower complaint, terminated DOJ litigator Erez Reuveni provided text exchanges to the Senate Judiciary Committee referencing his accusation that Bove said the government “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order” that would stop the Trump administration from deporting immigrants to a Salvadoran prison under a wartime statute.

“Guess we are about to say fuck you to the court"—"Super,” Reuveni, a veteran immigration attorney, texted a colleague, according to a trove of documents released Thursday by the top Democrat on the committee.

The colleague, whose name is kept anonymous, replied, “Well Pamela Jo Bondi is,” and “Not you.”

The texts, which respond to the Democratic lawmaker’s request for information substantiating Reuveni’s whistleblower complaint, are time-stamped on March 15. That was just as Reuveni learned two flights were headed to El Salvador with passengers that a federal judge had already ordered the government to keep on US soil.

Bove testified at his confirmation hearing last month that he has “never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi sought to discredit Reuveni by posting on X Thursday, “This ‘whistleblower’ signed 3 briefs defending DOJ’s position in this matter and his subsequent revisionist account arose only after he was fired because he violated his ethical duties to the department.”

While the disclosures don’t memorialize some of the more sensitive aspects of the complaint that took place in meetings or phone calls, they do help buttress many of Reuveni’s accusations of misconduct in the senior levels of the administration. The materials may serve to rebut the claims of his critics, including Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who called Reuveni a “disgruntled former employee” in a post on X. Blanche also said “not a single individual” agrees with Reuveni, a point that now appears to be refuted in the texts.

In a separate text discussion, Reuveni told his supervisor, August Flentje, “guess its find out time on the ‘fuck you.’” Flentje, who Reuveni has said attended the same meeting in which Bove made that remark, replied, “Yup. It was good working with you.”

Reuveni’s legal team disclosed the communications in response to a request from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). The ranking member of the Judiciary panel released the documents as he attempts to convince Senate colleagues to vote against confirming Bove to a New Jersey-based seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

“These episodes can only lead to one conclusion: Emil Bove belongs nowhere near the federal bench. This vote will be a litmus test for Senate Judiciary Republicans,” Durbin said in a prepared statement. “This is about more than a random f-bomb. This is a declaration of defiance of our courts at the highest level of our government by a man who now seeks a lifetime appointment to one of the highest courts in our land.”

Although written messages from Bove aren’t included in the files, there is an email from Yaakov Roth, then-acting head of DOJ’s Civil Division, in which he substantiates an allegation in the whistleblower report that Bove relayed a workaround to continue deportations despite the judge’s order. Roth states that Bove “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior” to “the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court’s order.” This refers to the reasoning that the judge’s verbal order wasn’t yet enforceable because it hadn’t been reflected on the docket.

The documents also include emails offering corroboration of Reuveni’s allegations that he made numerous unsuccessful attempts to get assurances from officials at DOJ, the State Department, and Department of Homeland Security that they’d comply with the court order not to deplane individuals in El Salvador.

Emails further elucidate multi-agency deliberations on how to explain in court the government’s wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a mega-prison in El Salvador, their confusion about his possible affiliation with the MS-13 gang, and DHS’s concession that an administrative error caused Abrego Garcia to be unlawfully deported.

Reuveni repeated this admission in court, which led him to be placed on administrative leave and later terminated—a resolution that was documented within the documents released by Durbin.

The Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Bove’s nomination July 17. For now he remains DOJ’s principal associate deputy attorney general.