President Donald Trump’s cabinet members are a ragtag band of loyalists, many of them profoundly unqualified, but all of them clear about their role: They are to serve as bobbleheads who do what they are told. It’s a pity and it’s dangerous, but he’s filling seats on his own team, the executive branch, and so was granted leeway.

Now, though, he’s trying to place a loyalist, a ferocious one named Emil Bove, on the Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, one notch below the Supreme Court. That’s not his team. That’s a separate branch, where no bobblehead belongs.

A judge is supposed to be a referee, but even Trump is boasting that his boy Bove is a cheerleader.

“He will do anything … that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,” Trump posted on social media. “Emil Bove will never let you down.”

LET THE RECORD SHOW

Trump is not guessing about that. He’s looking at Bove’s record as a prosecutor, which shows a disdain for the rule of law at every stage.

This is the guy who led the purge of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who worked on the prosecution of the January 6 rioters — even the 169 rioters who were convicted of assaulting cops that day, dragging them from their defensive lines to beat them with fists, feet, steel rods, and fire extinguishers.

Bove called the prosecutions “a grave national injustice.”

“That’s going after people who were just doing their jobs,” says New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker (D). Their targets, he says, were “people who viciously beat police officers. And violence against the police is not just wrong. It invites a level of lawlessness that is despicable.”

POLITICS OVER JUSTICE

Bove is also the guy who ordered that corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams be dropped, even though he conceded the decision was not based on the evidence or the law, but purely on politics. Adams was willing to cooperate with Trump’s deportations, and that was enough for Bove.

That was too much for the U.S. Attorney overseeing the case, Danielle Sassoon, a Trump appointee who quit in protest rather than sign her name to the order. One of her deputies, Hagan Scotten, a combat veteran, quit as well, offering this classic put-down in his resignation letter to Bove: “I expect you will find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

INTENTIONAL DECEIT

All that, believe it or not, is not the worst of it. The most alarming evidence against Bove was revealed in late June when a member of his own team at the Department of Justice took us behind closed doors, where Bove was discussing the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from Maryland who had been mistakenly sent to prison in El Salvador.

The question on the table: What if the courts order a halt to the deportations?

The whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, says Bove “stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’” and ignoring its orders. He also says Bove intentionally misled federal judges during deportation hearings.

Stop the train. Pull the alarm.

“In and of itself, that should be disqualifying,” Booker says.

Bove denies Reuveni’s claim, as he must, but the story fits neatly with the other cases where Bove has shown disdain for the rule of law. And why would Reuveni make this up and derail his own career? This is a guy who had defended Trump’s deportations in court several times.

POTENTIAL ‘LASTING DAMAGE’

“This is a dangerous nomination,” says Sen. Andy Kim (D) of New Jersey, who met with Bove in March because this is considered a New Jersey seat on the Third Circuit. “He could cause lasting damage, well beyond Trump’s second term. . . I’m hard-pressed to think of someone who is more unfit for being a federal judge than Mr. Bove.”

Dig into Bove’s history, before he joined Trump in Washington, and you find more rot, more lies, more disdain for the rule of law. In 2018, as an assistant prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, a unit supervised by Bove prosecuted a banker accused of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad.

But the charges were dismissed after a judge found that Bove’s team withheld evidence from the defense, breaking a cardinal rule of prosecutorial ethics. In a scorching ruling, District Judge Alison Nathan concluded that Bove’s team “deliberately” misled the defense

Nathan was so appalled that she ordered all prosecutors and assistants in the Southern District to read her 42-page opinion. “The manifold problems that have arisen throughout this prosecution — and that may well have gone undetected in countless others — cry out for a coordinated, systemic response from the highest levels of leadership within the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York,” she wrote.

Will Bove win confirmation? The Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Thursday, and if its June 25 hearing on Bove’s nomination is any guide, Bove will be approved on a party line vote. Booker and Kim are not optimistic about the floor vote either, and both suspect that Trump may nominate Bove for a seat on the Supreme Court next.

“I’m deeply worried,” Kim says. “His mission is clearly to defend Trump at all costs.”

To defend Trump. Not the Constitution. Not the rule of law. But one man whose campaign to degrade our democracy seems to be running right on schedule.

Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at [email protected].