Bove and Pirro won’t condemn January 6—and GOP senators no longer care

Despite vociferous objections by Democrats, the Senate Judiciary Committee looks set as of Thursday to approve Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Emil Bove, now a senior Justice Department staffer, as a federal appellate court judge, and judge-turned-Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as US Attorney for the District of Columbia—with vital support from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis.

Tillis is just one of a dozen GOP senators who have indicated plans to vote for both Bove and Pirro in committee. But Tillis, who recently announced, while vocally opposing Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” that he won’t seek reelection next year, is the only one who stated—just last week—that President Trump “should know if there is anyone coming up for a nomination through any committee of my jurisdiction that excused January 6, that they’re not going to get confirmed in my remaining tenure in the US Senate.”

Bove recently gained attention when a former Justice Department prosecutor alleged that, as a top subordinate to deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Bove told subordinates to violate court orders to execute Trump’s deportation plans: Bove told prosecutors to consider telling courts “fuck you” if judges raised legal objections, the whistleblower said. Bove, who denies saying that, also led the administration’s push to drop federal corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams, a reversal that led to the resignations of many federal prosecutors in New York and Washington, and which Bove himself—while denying a “quid pro quo”—linked to Adams allowing Trump to enforce his immigration agenda in the country’s largest city.

But Bove also served as arguably Trump’s top henchman in leading an effort to punish federal officials who investigated and prosecuted Capitol rioters. Bove ordered the firing of January 6 prosecutors, pushed FBI leaders to give him a list of agents who worked on Capitol insurrection cases, and advised Trump on an executive order offering blanket amnesty to about 1,600 January 6 defendants.

Pirro, as a Fox News host, was a leading promoter of Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election. She cited Sidney Powell’s infamous, bizarre, and baseless claims of an international conspiracy to rig the 2020 election to urge states that Biden won not to certify his electoral votes. Four days before the attack on Congress, Pirro used her show to egg on election deniers. And she called, this year, for January 6 prosecutors to face criminal charges.

In response to senators’ questions about January 6, which Mother Jones obtained, both nominees dodged and weaved, parsing their answers in an apparent effort to avoid angering Trump while also stopping short of overtly challenging Tillis. The North Carolina Republican in May torpedoed the nomination of Ed Martin, Pirro’s predecessor as acting US Attorney in Washington—due, Tillis said, to Martin’s ties to January 6 rioters. Still, both nominees, when pressed, sided with the president whose false claims incited the January 6 riot, and who continues to publicly push for DOJ to use its power to back those lies.

Asked by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) whether he denounced “the January 6 insurrection,” Bove demurred. “The characterization of the events on January 6 is a matter of significant political debate,” he wrote, citing ongoing litigation. If Bove wanted to condemn January 6 without the “insurrection” characterization, he didn’t do it elsewhere in 165 pages of questions and answers.

In a January 31, 2025, memo ordering the firing of January 6 prosecutors, Bove wrote that Trump had “appropriately characterized” the cases they pursued as “a grave national injustice.” Bove has since claimed that he ordered the firing of prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases only because they had been hired on a probationary basis. And he claimed his orders to FBI leaders to compile lists of agents who investigated the attack were not an effort to identify them for punishment.

But when asked by the committee’s chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), about those actions, Bove again faulted DOJ efforts on January 6, even comparing the actions of DOJ and FBI personnel to those of the people who battled police officers at the Capitol.

“I condemn all forms of illegal activity,” Bove wrote. “That is especially true with respect to acts of violence against law enforcement. At the same time…I find overreach and heavy-handed tactics by prosecutors and law enforcement to be equally unacceptable. These concerns are not mutually exclusive, and publicly available materials suggest that both concerns were implicated by some of the events on January 6, 2021.”

Bove dodged many questions about January 6. He acknowledged advising Trump on his pardon on January 6 rioters, but also said he did not remember whether he helped draft Trump’s executive order announcing the pardons.

Some of these evasions are simply odd. Bove, who himself worked on January 6 prosecutions while working in the US Attorney’s office in Manhattan—an effort he has worked to downplay—told Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) that he wasn’t in Washington on January 6. But Bove also told Durbin, “I do not recall where I was on January 6, 2021.”

Bove, on another front, declined to state that Trump could not serve a third term without a constitutional amendment. (“As a nominee to the Third Circuit, it would not be appropriate for me to address how this Amendment would apply in an abstract hypothetical scenario.”) Nor, like most Trump nominees, would Bove acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Pirro, who gave the same answer on the 2020 election, also evaded most questions she received on January 6.

In a January 2025 episode of a WABC show she hosted, a guest urged criminal investigations against January 6 prosecutors. Pirro responded: “I absolutely agree with that.” But when asked by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Pirro said she could “not recall” saying that.

Pirro also said she did “not recall” a January 2, 2021, monologue on her Fox News show in which she said: “January 6 will tell us whether there are any in Congress willing to battle for the America that those soldiers fought for, the one that you and I believe in.”

Pirro has also vociferously defended Trump’s amnesty for January 6 rioters, which, according to Just Security, included pardons for more than 600 people charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement—among them 172 who admitted to assaulting officers. But Pirro, the acting US Attorney in the office that prosecuted those cases, said this week, in writing, that she is “not aware that ‘rioters who were convicted of violent assaults on police officers’” received full pardons.

Back in May, after blocking Martin’s nomination, Tillis said, “We have to be very, very clear that what happened on January 6 was wrong.”

But Tillis in recent days said he would likely vote for Pirro due to what he called her strong “management” of her office, and that he would follow a “staff recommendation” to back Bove. That probably means both will be confirmed.

Tillis’ office did not respond to an inquiry about his planned votes, and he hasn’t further explained his apparent reversal. Regardless, the “clear” message he urged his colleagues to take on denouncing January 6 has become a muddle.