A former Donald Trump criminal defense attorney who climbed from controversial Justice Department official to lifetime federal appellate judge is now facing a formal misconduct complaint, all because he showed up at one of the president’s campaign-style rallies.
U.S. Circuit Judge Emil Bove, who sits on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, was reported to judicial authorities just one day after attending Trump’s event in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, a gathering the White House itself billed as a rally. The complaint sets up a fresh fight over how close a sitting federal judge can get to raw retail politics while still claiming to be an impartial arbiter of the law.
The complaint was filed by Fix the Court, a group that calls itself a “nonpartisan” nonprofit pushing “non-ideological fixes” to make the federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, more open and accountable. Its executive director, Gabe Roth, lodged the misconduct allegations with Chief Judge Michael Chagares on Wednesday, asking the 3rd Circuit to review Bove’s conduct.
In the filing, Roth acknowledges that judges do sometimes appear at events where a president is speaking. The complaint even points to the annual State of the Union address, where Supreme Court justices are a regular presence in the front rows.
🚨NEWS: Court reform advocacy group @FixTheCourt has filed a formal ethics complaint against Judge Emil Bove over his attendance at Trump’s PA speech last night.
“It should have been obvious to Judge Bove, either at the start of the rally or fairly close to it, that this was a… pic.twitter.com/V109FRKhLr
— Benjamin S. Weiss (@BenjaminSWeiss) December 10, 2025
Roth argues that what happened in Mount Pocono was something else entirely. According to the complaint, there is “no prohibition, of course, against a federal judge attending an event at which a President is speaking.” The problem, Roth says, is that “it should have been obvious” to Bove that this was not a neutral civic ceremony but a Trump campaign style production.
The White House itself described the Mount Pocono appearance as a rally, the complaint notes, framing it as a “highly charged, highly political event that no federal judge should have been within shouting distance of.”
Federal judges are expected to steer clear of partisan political activity, in public and in private, to preserve the appearance of neutrality. Showing up at a rally for a president who once relied on you as a criminal defense lawyer and later elevated you to the bench is the kind of move that ethics hawks say can erode public trust in a hurry.
Before landing on the 3rd Circuit, he served as a criminal defense attorney for Trump, then moved into a high level role at the Department of Justice, and only later was confirmed to a lifetime post on the federal appeals court. For critics, that orbit around Trump makes his presence at the rally even more troubling.
The complaint to Chief Judge Chagares does not demand a specific punishment but presses the court to examine whether Bove’s appearance at a campaign style event broke the rules that govern judicial conduct. The 3rd Circuit will now have to decide whether a judge’s attendance at a president’s rally crosses a line or can be brushed off as a personal choice with no consequence for the cases he hears.
