A top Justice Department official under scrutiny over a whistleblower's claims that he suggested ignoring court orders will face questions on Capitol Hill on Wednesday as he seeks to be confirmed as a federal appeals court judge.
Emil Bove , a former criminal defense attorney for President Donald Trump, has been behind some of the most contentious actions that Justice Department leadership has taken since January. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing comes a day after a former Justice Department lawyer alleged in a whistleblower complaint that he was fired after resisting efforts to defy judicial orders.
Bove was nominated last month by the Republican president to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was on the defense team during Trump's New York hush money trial and defended Trump in the two federal criminal cases brought by the Justice Department.
Bove is likely to face heated questions over the allegations made by the whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, who was fired in April after conceding in court that Kilmar Abrego Garcia , a Salvadoran man who had been living in Maryland, was mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison. Reuveni sent a letter on Tuesday to members of Congress and the Justice Department's inspector general seeking an investigation into allegations of wrongdoing by Bove and other officials in the weeks leading up to his firing.
Reuveni described a Justice Department meeting in March concerning Trump's plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act over what the president claimed was an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua . Reuveni says Bove raised the possibility that a court might block the deportations before they could happen. Reuveni claims Bove used a profanity in saying the department would need to consider telling the courts what to do and "ignore any such order," Reuveni's lawyers said in the letter.