Courtesy Vaughn Hillyard

Fix the Court’s Gabe Roth filed a judicial misconduct complaint today against Third Circuit Judge Emil Bove for attending a President Trump rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday (pictured at right).

Though Bove told a reporter that he was “just here as a citizen coming to watch the President speak,” it quickly became evident that the event had a strong partisan bent, with the President saying that he should be able to run for a third term, denigrating Democrats specifically and generally and calling former President Biden “a son of a bitch.”

As Roth wrote in the complaint, “There is no prohibition, of course, against a federal judge attending an event at which a President is speaking,” like the State of the Union or a state dinner. But once it became “obvious to Judge Bove, either at the start of the rally or fairly close to it, that this was a highly charged, highly political event that no federal judge should have been within shouting distance of,” he should have left.

Of course, he didn’t.

Roth asserts that two canons of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges were violated. First is Canon 2, which states that a judge “should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities,” and attending a partisan Trump rally clearly violates this canon. Second is Canon 5, which states that a judge “should refrain from political activity”; Tuesday’s rally being barely distinguishable from a Trump 2020 or Trump 2024 rally means this canon was also violated.

Roth asked Chief Judge Chagares to investigate the assertions in the complaint and to admonish Judge Bove for his behavior under the means available in the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act.

As Roth told Courthouse News Service on Wednesday, “You’ve got to take off your team hat once you don your robes, and that’s the opposite of what’s going on here.”