As President Donald Trump’s nominee for the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals approaches a Senate confirmation hearing, senior officials and former colleagues express concerns over his loyalties.

Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove is reportedly more attentive to President Donald Trump’s interests than to upholding the rule of law, according to former Justice Department attorneys and Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse.

The harsh words against Bove set up a high-stakes Wednesday hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Bove is set to be grilled on everything from the dismissal of corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams to the termination or demotion of DOJ employees who investigated the Jan. 6 insurrection.

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Bove was not just Trump’s “personal attack dog at DOJ,” as former Jan. 6 prosecutor Michael Romano put it, but he was the then-GOP presidential candidate’s personal defense attorney during his case-packed 2024 in the New York hush money trial and Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Now Bove could find himself with a lifetime judicial appointment — a fact that frightens his harshest critics.

“Bove and I both worked on cases arising out of the attack on the Capitol on January 6. Despite the evidence he would have seen when he joined the leadership of the Department of Justice under Donald Trump, he turned around and fired people who worked on those cases,” Romano said, per a video from Justice Connection, which describes itself as “a network of Department of Justice alumni mobilizing to protect DOJ employees and preserve the rule of law.”

“On the last Friday in January, Bove issued a memo to [then-interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia] Ed Martin directing Ed Martin to fire attorneys because those people, in his words, ‘couldn’t be faithfully trusted to implement the president’s agenda,'” Romano added. “Bove cannot be trusted to be impartial on the Court of Appeals.”

Ryan Crosswell is a former DOJ trial attorney who resigned from the department after 10 years because Bove asked him and his colleagues to dismiss the corruption case against Adams. “It appeared to be, in essence, a quid pro quo,” he added.

“Bove openly stated that it was not based on the facts of the law. It was based on the fact that Mayor Adams had expressed that he would enforce the president’s [immigration] policy,” Crosswell said. Other federal prosecutors resigned as well, including then-acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Danielle Sassoon, who refused to drop the charges against Adams when Bove directed her to do so.

Even worse allegations were made public on Tuesday. Bove suggested to other administration lawyers “resist[ing]” court orders regarding Trump’s mass deportation plan, according to a whistleblower letter from former DOJ lawyer Erez Reuveni — who was put on leave and then fired in April after he said he “refused directions from his superiors to file a brief misrepresenting” facts concerning Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man the administration admitted was improperly deported.

As top Justice Department lawyers met in March regarding Trump’s plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for his immigration plans, they reportedly discussed the possibilities of being shut down by a court order. According to Reuveni, “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.”

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche denied that any such events took place, describing Reuveni as a “disgruntled former employee” in a post on X.

The concerns surrounding the Trump ally are shared by Whitehouse, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee and is all but certain to question Bove on Wednesday. In anticipation of the hearing, the Democratic senator sent a letter to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Policy on Bove’s “scandal-ridden tenure at the Department,” requesting documents on Bove’s role in the Adams case and the freezing of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants.

“Emil Bove is a partisan MAGA crony who has weaponized the Department of Justice to serve the whims of President Trump,” Whitehouse wrote in an accompanying statement. “Bove cut a corrupt deal to throw out a federal indictment against the Mayor of New York City, and then pushed out and insulted the line attorneys who noted Bove’s lawlessness.”

“He has also been involved in scheming up a fake DOJ criminal investigation into a lawfully-authorized clean energy fund. The Judiciary Committee deserves real answers on Bove’s brazen misbehavior before he’s considered for a lifetime position on the federal bench,” the senator added.

As Whitehouse notes, he and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal filed ethics complaints against Bove in February following the Adams case’s dismissal.