Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee released a trove of documents Thursday that back up a whistleblower’s claim that Emil Bove, a senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official, crudely told subordinates to defy court orders.
Senate Democrats obtained the batches of documents from Erez Reuveni, a veteran DOJ attorney who said he was fired earlier this year after refusing to mislead a federal judge and for discouraging the Trump administration from engaging in illegal conduct.
Last month, Reuveni alleged in a whistleblower complaint to lawmakers that Bove suggested the department should tell courts “f*** you” and ignore their orders to carry out President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportations.
Reuveni claimed that Bove made the comment just before Trump was set to invoke the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), an 18th-century wartime law, to fly hundreds of people from the U.S. to a Salvadoran megaprison called CECOT.
Trump earlier this year nominated Bove to serve as a life-tenured judge on the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He’s currently a top official in the deputy attorney general’s office but previously defended Trump when he was convicted of criminal charges over hush money paid to a porn star.
The documents sent to members of Congress include text and email exchanges between Reuveni and his colleagues and supervisors within the DOJ as well as officials from Homeland Security and State Department officials.
In some of the exchanges, officials...
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