Can You Do More Burpees Than Emil Bove, Trump’s Cartoonishly Unqualified Nominee to the Third Circuit?
A brief investigation into Emil Bove’s illustrious CrossFit Open career.
Last week, President Donald Trump selected Emil Bove, his former criminal defense attorney who is now serving as Trump’s hatchet man within the Justice Department, for an even more prestigious promotion: a life-tenured seat on the Third Circuit.
Since Trump’s inauguration, Bove has been instrumental in, among other things, ordering the firings of prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases; arranging the deal to drop criminal charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, in exchange for Adams’s cooperation on immigration enforcement; and making legal threats against state and local officials whom the administration deems insufficiently cooperative with its mass deportation agenda. A good rule of thumb in nominations politics is that when Ed Whelan thinks you are too much of a hack to be a federal judge, you really, really have no business being a federal judge.
In a functioning democracy, Bove would be a relatively anonymous lawyer making a comfortable living doing white-collar defense work. In this country, he is a few months away from a life-tenured seat on a federal appeals court, because he understands that his boss’s only real interest in the law is using it to reward loyalists and accumulate more power.
Outside the office, Bove enjoys a hobby that is somewhat less harmful to society, but, in my view, no less insufferable: CrossFit, the preferred lifestyle and fitness brand of guys who look like thumbs and have strong opinions about their favorite Barstool personalities. Since 2019, Bove has been a perennial participant in the CrossFit Open, which is roughly analogous to the Olympic trials for the CrossFit Games, which is an annual CrossFit-sponsored competition in which a 28-year-old man died last year during the 800-meter swim. A February profile of Bove in The Wall Street Journal hinted at Bove’s dedication to his craft, noting that his “relentlessness” had not only helped him build a legal career, but also earned him “top marks at the annual athletic competition at his local CrossFit gym.”
Sure enough, Bove’s official CrossFit athlete page lists his scores for each competition’s designated workouts, which allows you to determine with specificity whether you are more or less fit than a guy who, as one of his first official acts, demanded the names of FBI personnel involved in investigating the January 6 attacks. In 2023, for example, Bove completed completed nearly all* of the fourth workout that year—two rounds of a circuit of wall walks, double-unders, and snatches—before ultimately failing to complete the requisite number of snatches at 135 pounds within the six-minute time cap. I understand his performance in this event to be respectable, if you are the type of person who thinks competing against strangers on the internet by doing wall walks for time is cool or interesting.
Last year, Bove’s scores across three designated workouts were good enough to make him the world’s 48,400th-ranked male CrossFit enthusiast—2,415th within his age group in the United States, and 2nd among the men at his gym, Crossfit Geronimo in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. Alas, this was apparently not enough to move on to the CrossFit Games quarterfinals, as I cannot find his name in the searchable list of competitors who made the cut.
Bove seems to have maintained his training since moving to Washington: Earlier this month, a user on the Washington, D.C. subreddit claimed that Bove had started attending their CrossFit gym, complaining that his presence, along with that of his “beardy faux operators hanging out in black SUVs,” really “suck[s] the oxygen out of the room.” That said, it seems that his run of consecutive CrossFit Opens may be coming to an end, as Bove’s name is nowhere to be found on the 2025 leaderboard. Holding down a full-time job as Donald Trump’s glorified legal errand boy, it turns out, leaves less time for doing muscle-ups.
*Thanks to reader Matt for correcting my description of Bove’s performance, which I inadvertently made sound better than it was. For obvious reasons, I regret the error.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.
This Week In Balls & Strikes
Federal Judges Increasingly Concerned That Trump Could Get Them Killed, Madiba Dennie
Republicans’ threats against the judiciary have some judges trying to figure out just how unsafe they are.
This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated
The Supreme Court Gifts Trump Even More Power, Lynn Rhinehart, The Nation
“The court’s order is going to embolden a president who has already shown himself willing to push or violate the boundaries of his power.”
Emil Bove Cannot Become a Federal Judge, Chris Geidner, Law Dork
“It is one thing to put lab-designed Federalist Society members on courts across the country…but it is another thing altogether to name a lawless loyalist to a federal appeals court.”
This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images
Unelected, for life, is a corruption two-fer. Roe was overturned by an intoxicated rapist, America's Great Hypocrite, the Starr Inquisitor himself. Brett was grabbin' em by the pussy long before Chump. ....
"II thought Brett was going to kill me." -- Christine Blasey Ford