Attorney General Pam Bondi scrambled Thursday to discredit a Justice Department whistleblower accusing DOJ leadership of planning to ignore court orders, piling more pressure on her leadership amid an intense backlash to her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.
“We support legitimate whistleblowers, but this disgruntled employee is not a whistleblower—he’s a leaker asserting false claims seeking five minutes of fame,” Bondi fumed on X.
Erez Reuveni, a former justice department attorney, filed a complaint to the Senate last month alleging that senior DOJ official and federal judge nominee Emil Bove suggested in a March 14 meeting that DOJ staff should say “f--- you” to courts and defy any order blocking migrant deportation flights from taking off to the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador the next day.
The DOJ fired Reuveni on April 11, after he admitted in court that officials mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia on one of those flights.
On Thursday, the whistleblower submitted new evidence to the Senate, including internal DOJ messages that appear to support his claim that Bove said the DOJ might have to ignore court rulings.
Bondi launched a fierce defense of Bove, who has denied the allegation, in her X post.
“No one was ever asked to defy a court order,” she wrote. “This is another instance of misinformation being spread to serve a narrative that does not align with the facts.”
Forced to walk back her February claim that a client list was “sitting” on her desk, she was ridiculed online by frustrated Trump supporters—many of whom had hoped his return to office would finally expose secrets about powerful elites.
In his first public interview since coming forward, Reuveni told The New York Times that the Trump administration displayed a troubling disregard for the law.
“If they can do this sort of thing to Abrego Garcia, to 238 people that nobody knows, and send them to CECOT forever with no due process, they can do that to anyone,” said Reuveni, who worked at the agency for more than 14 years before his firing. “It should be deeply, deeply worrisome to anyone who cares about their safety and their liberty, that the government can, without showing evidence to anyone of anything, spirit you away on a plane to wherever, forever.”
He accused the DOJ of “thumbing its nose at the courts, and putting Justice Department attorneys in an impossible position where they have to choose between loyalty to the agenda of the president and their duty to the court.”
Bove’s nomination to serve as a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to advance after a key swing vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Thom Thillis (R-NC), said he will “probably” support him, according to Politico.
