In February 1973, as the Watergate scandal intensified, Richard Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the director of the FBI. That proved to be a ridiculously bad idea: Over the course of the confirmation process, senators learned that Gray was up to his ears in the White House scandal, and whatever support he might have had quickly evaporated.
Just two months after Nixon announced Gray’s nomination, he pulled the plug, realizing that senators wouldn’t be able to overlook what they’d learned.
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently noted the Gray anecdote because of its similarities to Emil Bove’s judicial nomination. A scandal-tarnished Republican president? Check. A nominee who’s a little too close to the White House? Check. A confirmation process that made the nominee effectively unconfirmable? Check.
The difference is, 52 years ago, senators from both parties quickly came to terms with the facts that emerged about Gray. In 2025, most Senate Republicans didn’t bother to care about the revelations surrounding Bove.
Indeed, on Tuesday night, the GOP-led Senate voted to confirm Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, 50-49. Only two Republicans voted with the Democratic minority against Bove, who’ll soon be sworn in to serve on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
It is a lifetime appointment, suggesting the conservative lawyer will be positioned to serve several decades on the federal appellate bench.
Senators have faced plenty of controversial judicial nominations in recent memory, but I’ve long argued that Bove might be the most controversial of them all, and it’s worth appreciating why.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, when the president first announced Bove’s nomination in May, he claimed his former defense attorney is “respected by everyone.”
All things considered, “everyone” was a poor choice of words.
When Bove worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, for example, he earned a reputation as an unprofessional and abusive prosecutor. He parlayed this background into a role as a Trump defense attorney, punctuated by his defeat in the Stormy Daniels case, which paid dividends: Trump rewarded Bove with a powerful position in the Justice Department, where he fired federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and helped oversee the scandalous dismissal of New York Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case.
Just as importantly, if not more so, Erez Reuveni, a 15-year veteran federal prosecutor, recently came forward as a whistleblower to tell senators that Bove repeatedly endorsed ignoring court orders and deliberately misled judges. In a case involving the Alien Enemies Act and the administration’s alleged violation of a court order regarding deportation flights, Reuveni also described a meeting during which Bove “stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.”
Bove denied the whistleblower’s allegations, but internal documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats appeared to bolster Reuveni’s allegations — and additional whistleblowers soon followed. In case this weren’t quite enough, in his post-hearing written Senate questionnaire, Bove declined to rule out the possibility of the president. running for a third term — despite the plain language of the U.S. Constitution — and did not denounce the insurrectionist Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Given all of this, opposition to Bove’s judicial nomination from outside Capitol Hill was overwhelming and unprecedented: Several dozen former judges and more than 900 former Justice Department lawyers pleaded with the Senate to oppose him. Common sense might’ve suggested that there would be a significant number of GOP senators who agreed that Bove was simply a bridge too far, even by 2025 standards. In a chamber with 53 Republicans, if only four of them broke ranks with their party, the nomination would’ve failed. But that didn’t happen. During Watergate, GOP senators were willing to tell Nixon that they couldn’t in good conscience confirm Gray. A half-century later, four Senate Republicans couldn’t muster the courage to deliver a similar message to Trump.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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