Bove Told DOJ Lawyers to Ignore Court Orders, Whistleblower Says

Emil Bove, a Justice Department official and judicial nominee, told government lawyers to ignore court orders against the Trump administration’s move to deport immigrants to a Salvadoran prison under a wartime statute, according to a former department lawyer.

When considering the possibility that a federal court could block the removals, Bove said at a meeting that the government “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order,” Erez Reuveni, a veteran litigator for the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation, alleged in a Tuesday whistleblower complaint, obtained by Bloomberg Law.

The allegations, first reported Tuesday by the New York Times, were made public one day before Bove is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to a seat on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, a lifetime appointment.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on the social media platform X that the claims against Justice Department leaders “are utterly false.”

“I was at the meeting described in the article and at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed. This is disgusting journalism,” Blanche said.

Reuveni, who spent about 15 years as a career lawyer at the department, was handling various legal challenges related to the administration’s decision to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to remove immigrants accused of having gang ties to an infamous prison in El Salvador.

He was placed on administrative leave and terminated in April, after he admitted in court that the federal government should not have deported a Maryland man to El Salvador and that he hadn’t received a “satisfactory” answer from the government on why it couldn’t return him. He claimed in the complaint that his refusal to follow Bove’s order “directly resulted in his suspension and termination.”

The complaint was filed with the Justice Department’s inspector general, Office of Special Counsel, and members of Congress.

Several federal judges have since considered holding officials in contempt for violating their court orders related to these deportations.

Chief Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg of the Washington federal trial court, who is hearing a challenge to the deportation proclamation, found in April there was probable cause to find the government “willfully disobeyed a binding judicial decree” when it refused to turn the deportation flights around after he’d ruled against the effort.

Reuveni claimed that Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign “willfully misled” Boasberg during court proceedings when he said he didn’t know if any removals under the wartime law were imminent, despite allegedly being present at a meeting when Bove stated otherwise.

And after Reuveni said he reached out to other agencies to learn if they’d been told about the court orders, he claimed another official told him Bove was “unhappy” he’d done this and that he “should stop emailing agency counsel on the matter, to instead communicate by phone only, where possible.”

Bove, previously Trump’s personal lawyer, has emerged as a controversial pick for an appellate court seat. Earlier in his tenure at the Justice Department, he directed the firing of prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases and the dismissal of corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a Tuesday statement that Reuveni’s allegations “not only speak to Mr. Bove’s failure to fulfill his ethical obligations as a lawyer, but demonstrate that his activities are part of a broader pattern by President Trump and his allies to undermine the Justice Department’s commitment to the rule of law.”