In February 1973, as the Watergate scandal intensified, Richard Nixon nominated L. Patrick Gray to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the director of the FBI. That proved to be a ridiculously bad idea: Over the course of the confirmation process, senators learned that Gray was up to his ears in the White House scandal, and whatever support he might have had quickly evaporated.....

When Bove worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, for example, he earned a reputation as an unprofessional and abusive prosecutor. He parlayed this background into a role as a Trump defense attorney, punctuated by his defeat in the Stormy Daniels case, which paid dividends: Trump rewarded Bove with a powerful position in the Justice Department, where he fired federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and helped oversee the scandalous dismissal of New York Mayor Eric Adams’ corruption case.

Just as importantly, if not more so, Erez Reuveni, a 15-year veteran federal prosecutor, recently came forward as a whistleblower to tell senators that Bove repeatedly endorsed ignoring court orders and deliberately misled judges. In a case involving the Alien Enemies Act and the administration’s alleged violation of a court order regarding deportation flights, Reuveni also described a meeting during which Bove “stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f--- you’ and ignore any such court order.”

Bove denied the whistleblower’s allegations, but internal documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats appeared to bolster Reuveni’s allegations — and additional whistleblowers soon followed......

During Watergate, GOP senators were willing to tell Nixon that they couldn’t in good conscience confirm Gray. A half-century later, four Senate Republicans couldn’t muster the courage to deliver a similar message to Trump.