President Trump has nominated one of his most loyal personal attorneys for a seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. After defending the president at his criminal trial last year, Emil Bove has been serving as a high-ranking Department of Justice official since the beginning of the administration. 

Mr. Bove first served as deputy attorney general in an acting capacity between January and March before another personal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump, Todd Blanche, was confirmed by the Senate to fill the position. Mr. Bove served concurrently as principal associate deputy attorney general, a role he still holds. That post does not require Senate confirmation. 

In a Truth Social post on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Trump said his former personal lawyer will be nominated to fill a seat on the Third Circuit, which could very well be a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. 

Given his close relationship with the president and his relative youth at 44 years old, he would be a prime candidate if a seat on the high court opens in the next few years.

“Emil is a distinguished graduate of Georgetown Law, and served as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for nearly a decade, where he was the Co-Chief of the Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit,” Mr. Trump writes. “Emil is SMART, TOUGH, and respected by everyone. He will end the Weaponization of Justice, restore the Rule of Law, and do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

After serving as a government prosecutor for nearly a decade, Mr. Bove left the U.S. attorney’s office to join Mr. Blanche’s law firm. Mr. Bove then joined the Trump defense team, where he was unsuccessful in convincing a jury that the then-former president did not commit fraud during the course of his real estate development career. 

At the start of the second Trump administration, Mr. Bove was installed at the highest ranks of the justice department to ensure compliance with the president’s policy agenda. He became embroiled in scandal when it was reported that he led the charge to have Mayor Adams’s criminal indictment dismissed so that the city would comply with deportation efforts. 

That push from Mr. Bove led several conservative prosecutors to leave the U.S. attorney’s office at the Southern District of New York because they felt Mr. Bove was improperly interfering in a criminal prosecution for political reasons. 

The acting U.S. attorney for the district, Danielle Sassoon, penned an eight-page letter announcing her intention to resign her post after Mr. Bove launched his pressure campaign. Ms. Sassoon noted in her letter that she had clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court, who instilled in her “a sense of duty to contribute to the public good and uphold the rule of law.”

“The rationale given by Mr. Bove … is, as explained above, a bargain that a prosecutor should not make,” Ms. Sassoon wrote at the time. “Moreover, dismissing without prejudice and with the express option of again indicting Adams in the future creates obvious ethical problems, by implicitly threatening future prosecution if Adams’s cooperation with enforcing the immigration laws proves unsatisfactory to the Department.”

In a footnote in the letter, Ms. Sassoon stated that she attended a meeting with Mr. Bove and Mr. Adams’s attorneys in January. The defense lawyers described, she says, “what amounted to a quid pro quo,” meaning Mr. Adams’s compliance with deportation operations in exchange for a dismissal of the charges. 

Mr. Bove then “admonished” one of Ms. Sassoon’s employees for taking notes, and demanded that those notes be turned over to him at the conclusion of the meeting.