Pam Bondi Thinks Lying to a Federal Judge Makes You a Great Person

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi considers senior Justice Department official Emil Bove, who attempted to lie to a federal judge to speed up deportations, to be one of the “best human beings” she knows.

On Wednesday, Bondi was questioned by Senator Chris Van Hollen over recent disclosures from Justice Department whistleblower Erez Reuveni, who was fired by the Trump administration after admitting that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was an “administrative error.” Now Reuveni claims that Bove, at a meeting ahead of the invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798, told attendees to tell the courts “fuck you” and ignore any court orders that may stop a plane from taking off or a detainment from occuring.

“[Reuvini] says he was fired because he didn’t want to make an untruthful statement to a court of law,” said Van Hollen. “I have two questions. Number one, I assume you agree that zealous advocacy does not mean telling untruths to courts of law. And second, if that’s not the case, what do you mean by saying he was not a zealous advocate?”

Van Hollen hadn’t even named Bove, but Bondi immediately took it as an attack on her colleague.

“Senator Van Hollen, this is all pending litigation, as you’re well aware, and the timing of it. I can’t discuss pending litigation. This is a whistleblower lawsuit pending within my office, but I will say the timing of it I find suspect,” Bondi replied. “He takes hits at Emil Bove, who is one of the best human beings I know, one of the smartest, brilliant men I know, who will soon become a federal judge, and his hearing happens to be today, and I find the irony of the timing of it pretty remarkable, the lawsuit, but this had to do with attorney-client privilege information that was disclosed. I can’t talk about the substance, but what I will tell you, and you have obviously my word, any zealous advocacy means to be done ethically and honestly, always. And that’s what I mean by zealous advocacy.”

Bove is currently going through confirmation for a lifetime appointment to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Aside from the open corruption he’s accused of by Reuveni, Bove also unsuccessfully defended Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial, was key in dropping the multiple corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for his loyalty, fired prosecutors who investigated January 6 and accused the FBI of “insubordination” for not turning over the names of other staffers who worked on the investigation, and as a New York state prosecutor was described by colleagues as someone who could not “be bothered to treat lesser mortals with respect or empathy.”

Emil Bove struggled to answer simple questions about his work at the Department of Justice during a hearing before the Senate Wednesday.

Last month, Donald Trump nominated Bove, his former attorney, for a lifetime appointment to the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse was left fuming that Bove couldn’t provide a single straight answer to a line of questioning about an alleged plan with former interim D.C. Attorney Ed Martin to launch a criminal investigation for the purpose of seizing Environmental Protection Agency greenhouse gas reduction funds.

“I’m not aware of such a ‘plan,’ but I did participate in the matter that you are referring to,” Bove replied when asked about his involvement. Whitehouse pressed him on his efforts to work with Martin, but Bove continued to dodge his questions.

“Senator, like many nominees before me who come to testify before this committee, and are at the same time simultaneously serving in the department … I’m not going to be able to comment on the specifics of matters like that,” Bove replied.

“My answer is limited to, ‘I participated in the matter,’” he said, adding that he could only confirm what had been publicly reported. He proceeded to answer all of his questions roughly the same way. Eventually, Whitehouse became exasperated.

“Do you see my point now?” Whitehouse asked Republican Chairman Chuck Grassley, who’d seemingly provided Bove with the cover to evade question after question.

“We have an individual who is here seeking confirmation to one of the highest judicial offices in the land. I am asking quite legitimate questions about potential misconduct in office. Some of it has nothing to do with the substance of pleadings but has to do with administrative matters, like seeking the removal of a criminal career chief prosecutor. Some of it has to do with administrative matters like case assignment. And the fact that I can’t get anything resembling a straight answer in the circumstances that we’re in right now, I think signals a really bad moment for this committee,” Whitehouse said.

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal also criticized Bove’s invocation of a “so-called deliberative process privilege.”

“First, this committee and Congress have never accepted that kind of assertion as a basis to evade questioning in this kind of confirmation hearing, but I’d like to point out also that this witness has no right to evoke that privilege. It’s a privilege for the government of the United States to invoke,” Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal also pointed out that Bove was invoking the privilege “selectively.”

“When he wants to answer the question, no privilege. When he wants to avoid answering the question, he says he’s not at liberty to answer. We’ve never accepted that kind of tactic on the part of a witness,” Blumenthal said.

Fox News’s efforts to make Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani seem like a bad influence for New York City are only making him more appealing.

Following Mamdani’s shock win during Tuesday’s primary, conservatives and far-right influencers worked overtime to frame Mamdani as a “Marxist,” a “terrorist sympathizer,” and a “Muslim jihadist.”

But Fox News’s angle on the 33-year-old Queens lawmaker didn’t seem so bad. On Wednesday, the network aired a full screen of Mamdani’s “socialist promises,” including that he supports “no cost childcare” for city residents, wants to provide “baby baskets to newborns,” and plans on expanding New York City’s minimum wage to $30 per hour.

“Nothing says ‘radical’ like being able to eat and have a kid without needing to live in a tent,” responded one X user.

“Up next on Fox & Friends: Why cribs are Marxist and bibs are a gateway to full communism,” quipped another.

Mamdani’s campaign platform offers details on how the prospective mayor plans to implement his policies.

The campaign has argued that offering publicly funded childcare solutions within the city is critical to keeping New Yorkers in New York: “New Yorkers with children under 6 are leaving at double the rate of all others” due to the exorbitant cost of childcare in the city, according to the Mamdani campaign.

The program would offer free childcare “for every New Yorker aged 6 weeks to 5 years,” the campaign specified.

And Mamdani said he intends to base his “baby basket” policy on “more than 90 similar programs around the world.” His official platform claimed the investment would cost less than $20 million and would provide new parents and guardians “with a collection of essential goods and resources, free of charge, including items like diapers, baby wipes, nursing pads, post-partum pads, swaddles, and books,” as well as a resource guide on the city’s newborn home visiting program that offers help with “breastfeeding, post-partum depression and more.”

Raising the minimum wage to $30 would be another goal for a potential Mamdani administration by 2030, which philosophically argued that “making the minimum wage shouldn’t mean living in poverty” and that poverty-level wages paid out by some of the world’s wealthiest corporations only end up costing the public more as social programs have to effectively “subsidize” these low-wage employers.

“When working people have more money in their pocket, the whole economy thrives,” the campaign pitched.

Reporting by Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, underscores that the effectiveness of Trump’s strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday remains unclear.

A classified early report by the Defense Intelligence Agency made headlines on Wednesday, with one source telling CNN the assessment suggests the strike set Iran’s nuclear program “back maybe a few months, tops.”

Such reporting put a damper on Trump’s grandiose claims that the U.S. had “completely and totally obliterated” its targets in “one of the most successful military strikes in history.” The White House recognized the DIA report’s existence, but told CNN it was “flat-out wrong.”

On Wednesday, Trump argued that the available intelligence report was “very inconclusive,” but at the same time went so far as to compare the strikes to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

You may be surprised to hear that, of those two claims, the “inconclusive” remark is, for the time being, more on the mark.

Citing a “source familiar with the classified DIA intelligence report,” Griffin wrote on X that the preliminary report was issued with “low confidence,” and is based on just a “day’s worth of intelligence” that was available as of 9 p.m. EDT the day after the bombing.

Reportedly, the assessment was not conducted in coordination with other U.S. intelligence agencies, and it notes that it will take “days to weeks to accumulate necessary data” to compile a full battle damage assessment.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was once again chasing leaks out of the Pentagon Wednesday, after a leaked intelligence report disputed Donald Trump’s claim that his strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities had “completely and fully obliterated” them.

At a NATO summit in The Hague Wednesday, Hegseth fumed at the media after multiple outlets reported on an early assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that found Trump’s strike had only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months.

“The instinct of CNN, the instinct of The New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons, to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think, they don’t care what the world thinks, they want to spin it, to try and make him look bad, based on a leak,” Hegseth said.

“Of course, we’ve all seen plenty of leakers, and what do leakers do? They have agendas,” he continued. “And what do they do—do they share the whole information? Or just the part that they want to introduce?”

The Pentagon has descended into utter chaos under Hegseth, who reportedly spends half of his time investigating leaks, according to one former official who was fired as part of one of those investigations.

The secretary dismissed the report as “low assessment,” meaning there was low confidence in the data. Trump, who had also taken shots at the media over the report, said the intelligence had been “very inconclusive.”

Hegseth appeared furious at the suggestion that the strikes could’ve been anything other than a success, and went so far as to suggest that it would be impossible to actually determine the damage to nuclear enrichment facilities like Fordo, which is located deep inside of a mountain.

“So, if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel, and go really deep. Because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Hegseth announced that the Department of Defense would be coordinating on an investigation with the FBI to discover the mole, claiming that the report had been intended for “internal purposes, battle damage assessments.”