A key whistleblower against President Donald Trump's former Justice Department lawyer turned federal circuit judge Emil Bove has come forward to reveal more details about an infamous conversation in which he was urged to defy federal courts, The Daily Beast reported.
Bove's judicial nomination, which ultimately limped through to confirmation, was one of the most contentious so far in Trump's second term, as multiple people came forward to detail how he advised attorneys at DOJ to "f--- the courts" if they tried to rule against the president's mass deportation flights.
Trump used an ancient statute known as the Alien Enemies Act to claim certain people the administration deemed to be gang members could be removed with virtually no due process.
One of those key whistleblowers, former DOJ immigration strategist Erez Reuveni, spoke to CBS News' 60 Minutes over the weekend, and revealed just how that went down in the department.
Bove, Reuveni said, knew that the Alien Enemies Act declaration would face legal challenges, but the deportation flights had “to take off, no matter what” on schedule. “Then after a pause, he also told all in attendance: And if some court should issue an order preventing that, we may have to consider telling that court, ‘F--- you,’” he said. And once he said that, "it was like a bomb had gone off. Here is the number three official using expletives to tell career attorneys that we may just have to consider disregarding federal court orders.”
What made all this particularly "stunning," said Reuveni, is that fellow DOJ attorney Drew Ensign was in the room with him when Bove said this, and then, shortly after, Ensign was in court defending against a lawsuit by prisoners slated for deportation, and told U.S. District Judge James Boasberg he didn't know whether the flights were lined up yet.
This claim to a federal judge, Reuveni said, was an an effort to "mislead the court with intent," which is “the highest, most egregious violation of a lawyer’s code of ethics.”