Top Justice Department leaders – including President Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer nominated for a prestigious judgeship – intended to ignore court orders and tried to mislead federal judges in its aggressive deportation effort this spring, a Justice Department lawyer who was fired recently said in a whistleblower letter obtained by CNN.
The letter, which was sent to members of Congress and independent investigators within the executive branch on Tuesday, is likely to prompt greater scrutiny of Emil Bove, who has been serving as the principal associate deputy attorney general. Bove faces a Senate committee hearing on his nomination to the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday.
The whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, who worked on the case of the mistakenly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, says Bove in a March meeting “stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f*** you’” and ignore any orders to stop the hasty deportation of migrants to a prison in El Salvador.
The New York Times first reported on the letter.
Reuveni was an immigration litigator at the Justice Department who lost his job after he says he complained internally about the department’s lack of candor with the court.
Reuveni told a federal judge in Maryland that the administration had made a mistake when the US deported the Salvador undocumented immigrant Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran prison in March. He was placed on administrative leave shortly after.
He says he also refused orders from leadership to file a legal argument in court that he believed would be “contrary to law, frivolous and untrue,” according to the whistleblower letter.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and a longtime colleague of Bove, responded on Tuesday, saying “the complaint describes falsehoods purportedly made by a disgruntled former employee and then leaked to the press in violation of ethical obligations.”
Blanche called the claims about Bove “false” and attacked media reporting on the complaint.
CNN’s Paula Reid and Evan Perez contributed to this report.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
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