Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, confronted President Donald Trump's judicial nominee about conflicting stories in his testimony.
Questioning Emil Bove, who is Trump's nominee to the Third Circuit Court, Durbin cited the firings of several Justice Department prosecutors who worked on cases around the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol. Bove, he said, also sent the names of FBI agents who worked on those cases in what Bove called the "weaponization of the FBI."
He cited a Law360 article in 2022, in which Bove called the Jan. 6 attack a "national security issue" and the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. Bove wrote in the article that the prosecutions that "illustrate the asymmetry between international terrorism statutes and the patchwork of narrower laws that can be used to address domestic terrorism."
Bove claimed that they were only removed because they were put into those positions after the 2024 election and he didn't think it was fair that a previous attorney general should be able to hire their staff.
Durbin asked whether he supported the pardons of the Jan. 6 attacks, and Bove dodged, claiming that it isn't his job to question the pardons of a president.
"Mr. Bove, this doesn't square with your own words," Durbin said. "I have in my hand here the memorandum that you prepared on Jan. 31, 2025, to U.S. attorneys and others in which you made it clear that this was about more than provisional employees being dismissed."
He read what Bove wrote in the memo in which he gushes about Trump's pardons and attacks the prosecutions as politically motivated.
"This is not about provisional employees, this is about Jan. 6 prosecution. You call it a domestic terrorism event in this article that you have written. Most of us who lived through this ordeal understand that it was such a domestic terrorist event, and now you're trying to have it both ways," said Durbin. "You're saying you dismissed the people who prosecuted those who beat up on our law enforcement officers and had nothing to do with Jan. 6. Your words defy that."
See the exchange below or at the link.
- YouTube youtu.be
