It Takes a Government

Bondi and Bove are the chief villains—but they couldn’t have done it alone.

The rule of law took it on the chin this Tuesday.

First, Emil Bove’s confirmation delivered a lifetime judicial appointment—and potential Supreme Court candidacy—to a spectacularly unqualified nominee. In his brief tenure as Donald Trump’s personal fixer inside the Department of Justice, Bove amassed a record of bullying career attorneys and disregarding legal norms, including, according to multiple whistleblowers, ordering DOJ attorneys to defy court orders.

Second, later that same day, Attorney General Pam Bondi filed a silly judicial misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge Jeb Boasberg. The complaint parroted Trump’s relentless attacks on Boasberg, whose rulings in the Alien Enemy Act cases have become a flashpoint for MAGA ire. It was a textbook hatchet job—long on insinuation, short on substance.

Bondi and Bove were the lead antagonists in the day’s events, and multiple commentators have already documented their grave failings. But they are, in many ways, cartoon villains—drawn with two strokes: total faithlessness to law, and total loyalty to Donald Trump.

I write this dispatch to describe the many other contributors to their assaults on the law. A critical part of the story is the coordinated action—and even more damaging, the passivity—across the federal government that advanced Trump’s authoritarian aims. Bove and Bondi may be the headline grabbers, but an equal scandal lies in the cast of officials who aided and abetted.

My views on Bove are well documented. I’ve called him the least qualified judicial nominee in a generation, and now the least qualified sitting judge in the country. In his short tenure as Trump’s handpicked operator inside DOJ, Bove allegedly pressured career prosecutors to disobey court orders, overrode standard prosecutorial processes, and inserted himself into politically sensitive cases in ways that alarmed veteran attorneys. He left behind not just a trail of ethical breaches, but a blueprint for weaponizing the Justice Department to serve Trump’s personal and political aims. He is a lasting black eye on the DOJ, the Senate, and now the Judiciary.

As for Bondi’s tired screed camouflaged as a complaint letter, several others—Steve Vladeck in particular—have utterly demolished it.

The complaint just repackages MAGA talking points into an official grievance with no cogent factual or legal basis, and—as Vladeck shows—it proves nothing beyond that. Bondi assails Boasberg for making public comments when in fact the Judicial Conference, where the discussion occurred, is not public.

Second, Bondi portrays Boasberg’s concerns about the possibility the Administration would disregard legal rulings as unsolicited personal musings. That’s almost certainly wrong. Boasberg was likely relaying concerns expressed by his colleagues and at the request of the Chief Justice.

Third and most obnoxiously, Bondi asserted that Boasberg was mistaken because “the Trump Administration has always complied with all court orders.” That’s a falsehood out of Orwell: invent a false record and act as if it has always been true. “Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” Bondi has used the same maneuver to insist that Biden politicized prosecutions while Trump did not—when the exact opposite is demonstrably true.

Bondi and Bove are wicked actors, but drop them into a random democracy in another place and time, and they would never be able to do even a fraction of the damage they have inflicted in the last six months. Their malign deeds are enabled by a federal government as constituted in the age of Trump, in which large chunks of all three branches have been converted into instruments of the president’s personal will.

The Executive Branch—especially the Department of Justice—has been both the source and the signal of the broader corruption within the government. Bondi, Bove, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche—who just took a bizarre two-day trip to interview Ghislaine Maxwell—are each using the immense power of their offices not to serve the public, but to advance Trump’s political and legal interests.

And they’re doing so with an especially ruthless mix of malice and dishonesty. Bondi’s recent complaint is paradigmatic. It would be illegitimate in any case, but the savaging of Judge Boasberg is stunningly off-base. Boasberg is a judge’s judge who enjoys huge respect from Republican and Democratic appointees alike, and who has proceeded cautiously and meticulously in the El Salvador case that Bondi tries to proffer as a sign of his partisanship. More Orwell.

And Bove punched his ticket for the judicial nomination by his service as Trump’s henchman and enforcer within the Department. Other administrations would not have the temerity to nominate someone with Bove’s appalling track record of lawlessness, malice, and deception. For Trump, those were not faults to be overlooked but the most vital credentials—because they provide reassurance that Bove will take his side even if the law and Constitution point the other way.

Just up the street from the Robert F. Kennedy DOJ building sits the Senate, which shamefully voted to confirm Bove. Or more precisely, the Senate Republican caucus did—since Bove received no Democratic votes and all but two Republican ones. The Senators had full knowledge of the allegations against Bove—credible whistleblower accounts, documentary evidence of wrongdoing—and confirmed him anyway with scarcely a pretense of his merit. It was the cynical, sycophantic Senate Republicans at their pusillanimous worst.

Finally, the judicial branch bears some of the responsibility here. Judge Michael Luttig wrote an insightful piece about the Bondi complaint entitled “Where is the Supreme Court of the United States?” Luttig took the Court to task for not defending Judge Boasberg, and lower courts in particular, against the Administration’s benighted viciousness. Luttig wrote, “And with every passing day that the Supreme Court refuses to denounce the President and his Attorney General for these insufferable attacks, out of either fear or favor, the Supreme Court’s own legitimacy is further compromised and the complete corruption of the Rule of Law draws nearer.”

Indeed, the Court has made the lives of district court judges much harder in a number of instances, including the Trump v. CASA decision, which sharply curtailed their authority to issue nationwide injunctions.

Moreover, both Bove’s confirmation and the attack on Boasberg were facilitated by two circuit judges, both Trump appointees, who have imposed an administrative stay on Boasberg’s inquiry into whether the Administration should be held in criminal contempt. This was part of the fallout from the Department’s noncompliance with Boasberg’s orders concerning the illegal deportations to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, which multiple witnesses have ascribed to Bove. Bove’s confirmation prospects might have looked different with a meticulous review and finding by Boasberg that Bove purposely flouted the court’s order. Or, with this go-along, bovine Senate—maybe not.

Bondi and Bove are grotesque figures. But grotesques don’t gain power in healthy democracies. They flourish when institutions falter—when guardrails are removed, norms are shredded, and complicity becomes widespread.

Bove now has life tenure. Bondi continues her know-nothing campaign to delegitimize courts. And they do so with important support—or worse, quiet tolerance—of the branches meant to constrain them.

It’s infuriating. Yet with so many members in government combining to degrade constitutional rule, there are that many targets to push back against. Viewing the Bondi-Bove outrages through the broader prism of federal governance is also a call to redouble resistance—to stand up, speak out, and demand accountability from a wide swath of government officials. If the institutions won’t hold the line, then it falls to the rest of us to call out their complicity and insist that they honor their oaths and defend the rule of law.

Talk to you later.