WASHINGTON (CN) — As he seeks confirmation to a key vacancy on the federal judicial bench, Emil Bove has staked out a carefully balanced position on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, according to his answers in a written questionnaire provided to lawmakers last week.
Bove, President Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and a former member of his personal legal team, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in the questionnaire that he condemned illegal activity and acts of violence against law enforcement. But he also suggested that the government’s prosecution of Jan. 6 rioters amounted to overreach, something he said was “equally unacceptable.”
The nominee’s Jan. 6 balancing act comes ahead of a crucial vote in the Judiciary Committee, where one Republican senator has already tanked a Trump administration judicial appointee over his stance on Capitol riot prosecutions.
In questions for the record, submitted to the Senate’s legal affairs panel on July 2 and obtained Friday by Courthouse News, Bove defended his involvement in the Justice Department’s move to fire federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases in the early weeks of the second Trump administration.
The nominee had faced tough questions about the firings during his June confirmation hearing before the Judiciary Committee. At the time, Bove argued that the terminated prosecutors working in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office were “probationary” employees made permanent by former President Joe Biden after the 2024 election.
Writing in response to questions from Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley last week, Bove repeated those claims, citing a public memo from January in which he framed the Biden administration’s move as a mass hiring of assistant U.S. attorneys which “improperly hindered” then-acting U.S. attorney for D.C. Ed Martin's ability to staff his own office.
“The memorandum further explained that these ‘subversive personnel actions’ drove my thinking about the termination decisions of these probationary employees,” Bove wrote.
But in his memo to the U.S. attorney’s office, then-deputy attorney general Bove referred to the Capitol riot prosecutions as a “grave national injustice.”
The nominee also addressed a separate memo from January in which he requested a list of FBI employees assigned to Jan. 6 cases for review, pointing out that ongoing litigation has kept the Justice Department from undertaking such a review. And he referenced a private email he sent to the FBI in February in which he said that FBI employees who “simply followed orders and carried out their duties in an ethical manner” would be at risk of termination.
Though he explained away the Justice Department’s firings and reviews of officials working on Capitol riot cases, Bove took a more measured approach to the prosecutions themselves.
Pointing to his own experience as a federal prosecutor in New York, the Third Circuit nominee said that he condemned “all forms of illegal activity,” especially with respect to acts of violence against law enforcement.
“At the same time, based on a variety of professional experiences, I find overreach and heavy-handed tactics by prosecutors and law enforcement to be equally unacceptable,” Bove wrote.
And those concerns, the nominee added, were not “mutually exclusive,” and both were implicated by the events of the Capitol riot.
Bove also refused to directly denounce the riot in responses to Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, reasoning that if confirmed to the federal bench he may be required to address litigation related to Trump’s sweeping pardons of Capitol rioters.
But he also left room for debate on the character of the Jan. 6 attack. “The characterization of the events on January 6, 2021 is a matter of significant political debate and subject to ongoing litigation,” Bove wrote.
Follow @BenjaminSWeiss
