President Donald Trump announced that he has nominated one of his former personal attorneys, Emil Bove, to Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Note: After representing Trump in his classified documents and election obstruction cases (as a partner in Todd Blanche‘s law firm), Bove was appointed principal associate deputy attorney general and acting U.S. deputy attorney general — until March — in the second Trump administration. (Blanche was confirmed as U.S. deputy attorney general in March.)
This is an outrageous and unacceptable nomination. This is a test of Senate Republicans and the conservative legal movement. This is a nomination that must fail. https://t.co/7XRdbFvSmT
— Gregg Nunziata (@greggnunziata) May 28, 2025
Conservative attorney Gregg Nunziata, who served as policy counsel to the Senate Republican Policy Committee, general counsel and domestic policy adviser to then-Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), and as a litigator in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, responded on X by writing: “This is an outrageous and unacceptable nomination. This is a test of Senate Republicans and the conservative legal movement. This is a nomination that must fail.”
[NOTE: The Guardian reported in April that “more than 250 attorneys in the justice department’s civil rights division have either left, been reassigned, or accepted a deferred resignation offer since January…The significant decrease in personnel underscores how Donald Trump is gutting the arm of the federal government responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws.]
Nunziata added: “Conservative lawyers who have excused and enabled Trump often have done so with a ‘but Judges!’ excuse. They’ve lost that excuse. It’s time to put principle before expedience. It’s time for some courage. It’s time to say ‘no’ to Trump.”
Republican attorney Mike Davis — who like Nunziata also served as Chief Counsel for Nominations, Senate Judiciary Committee — replied to Nunziata by trying to shame him as a closet Liberal and sharing the post below in which Nunziata wrote: “I hate voting for Kamala Harris, but it is the only conservative thing to do.”
Davis wrote of Bove’s nomination: “The left fears Emil Bove because he’s effective. The establishment right resents him because he refuses to play by their rules. But that’s exactly why President Trump chose him.”
https://t.co/iKYLJxBtK0 https://t.co/TaMU05wnCY
— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) May 29, 2025
Nunziata said his objection to Bove was not about politics but respect for the law: “I’m a former chief nominations counsel to Senate Republicans,” he wrote. “Confirming principled conservatives who look to the law, not politics, has been much of my life’s work. Emil Bove is the opposite of that, and it should be no comfort that his politics are Right rather than Left.”
He added: “As an executive branch official, Bove has proven he cannot honor his oath or put law before politics. Putting him in a robe, with life tenure and a much higher obligation to serve law over politics, would be an obscenity. The Senate must reject this nomination.”
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