Trump admin 'sidelined' its own lawyers' warnings about case with 'no factual basis'

The Trump administration ignored Justice Department investigators who told it to ditch a case that lacked any factual basis, per The New York Times.

According to a Tuesday article by The Times, the DOJ under President Donald Trump pushed investigators to find civil rights violations at three Ivy League universities, but when those investigators found none, it "sidelined" them.

The accusations came from a former DOJ civil rights lawyer, Haley Van Erem, and her colleagues, whose names were redacted, after Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released their account of the fiasco on Tuesday, according to The Times.

The Trump administration used campus antisemitism as a basis for cutting federal grants at Brown, Columbia, and Harvard, but the account from Van Erem and her colleagues said that Trump officials had "a predetermined, outcome-driven approach to enforcement rather than a fact-based investigative process," according to The Times.

When Van Erem and her colleagues "raised issues with the lack of a factual basis" to go after the three East Coast Ivy League universities, "their disagreements were sidelined, or they faced reprimands," The Times reported.

Van Erem raised her concerns while she was temporarily assigned to the health department, which oversees some of the largest research funding for universities, The Times reported.

She and her colleagues were told in April 2025 about a plan to "systematically interview Middle East studies professors, particularly Muslim faculty" at Brown, according to The Times. The idea was to see if the faculty would say anything that could be labeled as antisemitic, The Times reported.

In April 2025, Sean Keveney, who was then the health department's acting general counsel, told Van Erem that the White House was pulling grants from Harvard and showed her a proposed settlement that included "installing a provost to oversee curriculum, ending DEI programs, placing endowment money in trusts the government could seize and investing in programs in Israel," per The Times.

"While at the DOJ, Ms. Haley Van Erem did not work on university investigations," a DOJ spokesperson told The Times. "And for all matters, the department stands behind the integrity of these investigations."