A top Justice Department official left a room full of government lawyers stunned when he said that they might have to say “f--- you” to court orders blocking deportations, according to a whistleblower.
Emil Bove, previously a personal attorney for Trump, unveiled his intention to defy the courts during a closed-door meeting in mid-March, a fired former DOJ attorney wrote in a disclosure obtained by The New York Times.
During the meeting, Bove revealed that the administration planned to speedily fly a group of undocumented immigrants out of the country that weekend using an arcane 200-year-old law.
When it came to the prospect of a court order against the action, he did not mince words.
“Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f--k you’ and ignore any such order,” according to ousted DOJ lawyer Erez Reuveni’s account.
After the remark, Reuveni “perceived that others in the room looked stunned, and he observed awkward, nervous glances among people in the room. Silence overtook the room.”
Reuveni, who was a 14-year veteran of the DOJ’s immigration office, left the meeting in a state of ”disbelief,” his account said.
Reuveni was fired in April after he admitted in court that deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia “should not have been sent to El Salvador.”
He claims that he “was thwarted, threatened, fired and publicly disparaged for both doing his job and telling the truth to the court.”
Reuveni’s lawyers sent his account to Congress on Tuesday—a day before Bove, whom Trump has nominated to be a federal appeals judge, is set to testify before the Senate.
The disclosure describes several instances of misconduct by the Justice Department, which Reuveni says tried to ignore court orders “through lack of candor, deliberate delay and disinformation.”
Asked for comment, the Justice Department directed the Daily Beast to an X post made by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“The New York Times article describes falsehoods purportedly made by a disgruntled former employee and then leaked to the press in violation of ethical obligations,” he said.
Blanche also ripped the Times for publishing the story.
“This is disgusting journalism,” he said. “Planting a false hit piece the day before a confirmation hearing is something we have come to expect from the media, but it does not mean it should be tolerated.”
On March 15, a day after Bove reportedly floated defying the courts, the Trump administration shipped about 140 Venezuelan migrants from the U.S. to a megaprison in El Salvador, ignoring a federal judge’s emergency order that they turn the two planes around.
Since then, Trump and the Justice Department have fought a bitter battle with Judge James Boasberg over whether they defied the order. The judge threatened to hold top Trump officials in contempt, while the president has called Boasberg a “radical left lunatic.”
Behind the scenes, Trump-loyal DOJ officials thwarted Boasberg by lying, distorting facts, and making arguments with no legal basis, Reuveni claims.
Reuveni recalled that one of his bosses, Trump-appointee Drew Ensign, lied to Boasberg’s face when asked if any deportations were imminent in the next two days.
“I don’t know the answer to that question,” Ensign responded—even though Reuveni says he was in the meeting where Bove mentioned the impending deportations.
On March 17, Reuveni says he was told that DOJ leadership had decided that “the government was not going to answer the court’s questions about anything that happened before 7:26 p.m. on March 15, and so not to provide information about when the flights took off.”
Reuveni, who had serious legal and ethical concerns about the tactics, increasingly fell into conflict with his bosses, who offered few answers to his questions.
The breaking point came when Reuveni was assigned to make arguments on the governments behalf in the case of Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration refused to return from the El Salvador prison despite a court order telling them to do so.
After Reuveni acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported, one of his bosses, Drew Ensign, asked him why he did not argue that Abrego Garcia was a terrorist.
Reuveni pushed back that he had not found evidence to support the terrorism claim and that it did not nullify Abrego Garcia’s right to due process.
As he was pushed to sign a brief with the terrorism claim, Reuveni refused, saying, ”I didn’t sign up to lie,” according to his disclosure.
He was fired soon after.
