Former Obama administration attorney general Eric Holder ripped into President Donald Trump's nomination of far-right Justice Department lawyer Emil Bove to serve as an appellate judge, despite his long history of involvement in controversial and potentially unlawful proposals for federal law enforcement policy.
This follows Senate Democrats taking the highly unusual step of staging a mass walkout from the Judiciary Committee vote to advance Bove's nomination, after Republicans moved to suppress any further debate on his candidacy or the testimony of a whistleblower who alleges he advised the Justice Department to ignore court rulings on immigration.
"This is someone who I think acted in a way at the Department of Justice we've never seen someone act, certainly not in my lifetime, and maybe not since Nixon and maybe not ever in terms of how he used the Department as a tool of the president, seemed to violate court orders, struck this insanely corrupt deal with Eric Adams that led to mass resignation in the office," said anchor Chris Hayes. "What does it mean to have this guy as an appellate judge for the country, for the Constitution?"
"This nomination is a travesty," said Holder. "And everybody, people in the Senate who oppose that nomination, should do all they can to make sure that in fact he does not get confirmed to a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals."
"This is a guy who dismissed a case against Eric Adams and when asked, said, well, it doesn't have anything to do with the facts, doesn't have anything to do with the law, but in spite of that, we're going to dismiss the case, obviously for political reasons," said Holder. "He was the hatchet man who came to the Justice Department early on and was responsible for the dismissal of well-intentioned, good, well-serving career prosecutors as well as career FBI agents, involved also in withholding materials, creating a Brady violation in a case that ultimately had to be dismissed by those great prosecutors in the Southern District of New York."
"There's nothing in his record, absolutely nothing in his record, that would justify him getting a court of appeals slot," Holder added. "There's a ton of things in his record that render this nomination, as I said, a travesty. And I would hope that people in the Senate — I'm not totally conversant with Senate rules, but I would hope that a senator would put a hold on his nomination and make the Republicans do everything that they have to do in order to place him in what is a lifetime appointment. He doesn't deserve it. He does not deserve it."
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