During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) asked Evil Bove, one of President Trump's judicial nominees, about President Trump's criminal prosecution.
00:05I'm going to pivot away from the Democrats' fake outrage on lawfare and talk about real lawfare.
00:12How has your representation of President Trump in the biggest weaponization of the justice system
00:21against a single individual because they didn't want to get back into office
00:24and lawfare shaped your view of the justice system?
00:30Well, from the perspective of a prosecutor, Senator, it turned me into a person who wanted to get that building back on the right track,
00:43a track where people are, in fact, doing the right thing for the right reasons.
00:48And I think there's many, many, many people, career civil servants in the department who are doing just that.
00:55But I also think that there are parts of the department that had lost sight of that obligation,
01:01and I saw that in my experiences as a defense lawyer.
01:05And so what I would say is that that experience provided me with intense focus on reform efforts
01:11to make sure that the unelected bureaucracy at the department was not in a position to subvert the political will
01:18of the democratically elected president.
01:22Let's take a little time machine back to 2023 when you, as you, in your previous testimony talked about,
01:29decided to join Todd Blanch in the legal team.
01:32That was, at the time, many people in this country sort of wrote off President Trump as a candidate.
01:43The Democrats didn't think he was ever going to win.
01:44I certainly, I endorsed him very early.
01:46I thought he would and was hoping that he would.
01:49But the acts, the links to which nonprofits and other organizations went to punish anyone
01:59who was involved in either defending President Trump or had worked for President Trump,
02:07trying to deny them employment, I mean, it's well documented.
02:10So to take that on, I would agree with your character.
02:12I think that took a lot of courage for you to do it.
02:15In hindsight now, it looks like, obviously, a very smart decision.
02:18You guys were very successful in the defense, and he went on to win the election and the popular vote in a landslide.
02:23But at the time, that wasn't the case.
02:24I want to ask you, in some of this lawfare, Michael Colangelo left, he was the number three guy at DOJ
02:32and left to join the New York District Attorney's Office in the prosecution of President Trump.
02:39Is that unusual for someone to leave that kind of position to go to a DA's office prosecuting a political opponent?
02:48Senator, I have to be very careful here because of the judicial canons that bind me as a nominee.
02:54Let me ask it this way.
02:55Have you ever heard of something like that happening before?
03:03To my understanding, there was a pretty unique set of circumstances.
03:06Let me speak about another set of unique circumstances.
03:09Is it unusual for, like, an assistant district attorney in a Georgia case to be meeting with the White House counsel's office about a prosecution of President Trump?
03:19Would that be sort of an unusual set of circumstances, to be visiting the White House?
03:24Let me ask you, have you ever heard of a scenario like that previously?
03:27Senator, if I could frame it this way, there's publicly filed briefing signed by myself and other defense lawyers when we were defending President Trump that regarded the circumstances that you just described as part of a discovery violation.
03:44Okay.
03:47Tish James, the attorney general in New York, ran on, like, ran for office saying she wanted to go after and prosecute President Trump.
03:59Have you ever heard of an attorney?
04:00I ran for attorney general in my state.
04:02Have you ever heard of anyone campaigning on the idea?
04:05In the United States of America, I'm not talking about a third world banana republic,
04:08but in the United States of America, prosecuting, criminally prosecuting a political opponent, that was their pitch to the voters.
04:15Have you ever heard of anything like that?
04:19I've got to be very careful here about getting too close to politics.
04:23Sure.
04:24Under the judicial canon, Senator.
04:25Okay.
04:27Jack Smith was appointed special prosecutor to try to, again, imprison President Trump for the rest of his life so he couldn't run for office.
04:37Could you speak, were you involved in the legal team defending President Trump in that prosecution as well?
04:44Both in the District of Columbia and in the Southern District of Florida.
04:47Could you just rattle off a couple of things that you think were unusual,
04:51departures from how prosecutors would normally handle cases like that,
04:55that, again, has informed your position now to make sure that that never happens again to somebody in this country?
05:02I will, Senator, and I referenced some of these a moment ago, and I just want to be clear.
05:06What I'm doing is just referencing public arguments that I made as a defense lawyer.
05:10Yes.
05:10But, yes.
05:11Not personal musings.
05:12These are, yes, absolutely what we're filed with the court.
05:15These are legal arguments that we presented that, for example, in a case as complex as the case in Florida,
05:21with the allegations that were set forth,
05:24in our judgment as defense lawyers, we argued to the court that it was highly unusual
05:30to try and proceed to trial as quickly as those prosecutors initially proposed.
05:36Anything else that struck you as unusual that you can recall from the public filings?
05:45I think just to be safe and to stand on the side of this.
05:49Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
05:49I just want to make the point that while the Democrats are trying to manufacture something here,
05:54like, we're on the other side of the most political prosecution of a political opponent
05:59this country has ever seen, and I hope to God that never happens again,
06:03and your experience, I think, will make you a better judge.
