Trump’s Judge Pick Is The Guy Who First Suggested The Administration Start Murdering People In Boats

from the cadre-of-ghouls-that-at-least-look-the-part dept

This isn’t as surprising as it should be. After all, we’re talking about Emil Bove, who was elevated from being Trump’s personal lawyer to a spot in the Third Circuit Appeals Court for his loyalty to the MAGA Cause.

Emil Bove did at least spend some time as a government prosecutor, which is more than can be said about several other people Trump has turned into administration officials. But he’s also the guy whose first few months as the deputy attorney general doing things like dropping the DOJ’s corruption case against former NYC mayor Eric Adams once Adams made it clear he’d do whatever Trump asked of him.

He’s also the one who told DOJ prosecutors (most of whom have either quit or been fired for refusing to be part of the problem) to say “fuck you” to federal courts if they tried to get in the way of Trump’s mass deportation program.

So, to hear he might have been the first to pitch the extrajudicial killing of brown people doesn’t exactly provoke gasps of disbelief. It probably provokes more “well, of course he did” reactions from anyone who’s been paying attention to Bove’s actions and statements since his return to the [chokes a bit on the phrase] public service.

At a Justice Department conference in February, then-acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove told the department’s top drug prosecutors that the Trump administration wasn’t interested in interdicting suspected drug vessels at sea anymore. Instead, he said, the U.S. should “just sink the boats,” according to three people present for the speech.

That’s from NPR’s reporting on Bove’s comments, which were apparently delivered months before the administration finally got around to “just sinking boats.” Not that Bove’s comments contained any sort of legal guidance or justification for these extrajudicial strikes — the first ever carried out by any presidential administration.

That would arrive much, much later. In fact, it wouldn’t arrive until after the first strikes had already taken place, and they’ve been revised at least once in hopes of dodging judicial review of these actions.

No one’s actually coming forward to dispute Bove made these comments, and that includes Bove himself, as Reuters reports:

Reuters could not determine whether Bove, who left the department in early September to begin serving as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was directly involved in discussions with the Pentagon about the plans to strike suspected drug vessels.

Bove declined to comment through a court spokesperson. A Justice Department spokesperson downplayed the recollections of the witnesses, calling them “disgruntled,” but did not dispute their account.

None of this adds up anything approaching the level of decorum — much less legal acumen — we hope would be the minimum expected of judges seated anywhere, but especially in a position where the only people capable of rejecting Bove’s legal opinions seem to be similarly compromised. These strikes are something even the nation’s foremost torture apologist — former DOJ Office of Legal Counsel deputy attorney general John Yoo — has publicly stated are both illegal and unconstitutional.

But this is the guy who sits in the Third Circuit Appeals Court, at least for now. Maybe his brief history of encouraging illegal and unconstitutional actions will catch up to him, as Jay Willis of Balls and Strikes hopefully suggests:

For my money, the most remarkable detail of this story is how unserious a person it shows Bove to be. Based on the timeline, his “just sink the boats” comments were not based on a carefully researched, thoroughly vetted opinion about the legality of using military airstrikes to murder civilians in international waters. Bove was just another sweaty, ladder-climbing try-hard who wormed his way into Trump’s inner circle, jumped at the chance to live out a vigilante justice fantasy, and trusted that actual lawyers would take care of the details for him. 

Bove’s alleged involvement in the airstrikes gives Democrats even more fodder for impeaching and removing him from office next time they control the House and Senate.

That’s a few too many “if’s” for my liking, but it does at least point out there’s a way to remove at least a few of Trump’s appointees, possibly even before Trump himself has exited the Oval Office.

But the bigger point is in the paragraph preceding the path to a forced exit: Bove is emblematic of the people in positions of power in the Trump administration. These are people who don’t care whether or not anything is constitutional or even legally-defensible under the most expansive definitions of executive power. They just do what they want to do and it’s up to the rest of the nation to stop them. And that plan that can’t really even be called a “plan” is working. Installing a murder proponent like Bove in an appellate court is just more grease on the wheels.

Filed Under: boat strikes, donald trump, drug war, emil bove, extrajudicial killings, murder, trump administration