A vile attack lurks in the past of Trump's latest darling
Friends,
The Justice Department has just launched a criminal investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson. Remember her?
Hutchinson was the young, courageous former White House aide whose testimony before Congress implicated Trump in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Not surprisingly, her testimony enraged Trump. So, the Justice Department is now accusing Hutchinson of having lied to Congress, which is a criminal offense.
It’s just the latest example of Trump’s vindictive and perverse use of the Justice Department to go after people he perceives to be his enemies.
Who’s been assigned to carry out this vicious investigation? Not anyone in the criminal division, which you might expect would have expertise in pursuing a criminal case. No, Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, has assigned the case to the Civil Rights Division, which in normal times focuses on civil rights abuses like police misconduct and racial discrimination.
Blanche has given the case directly to Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon, an unblinking Trump loyalist, has emerged as an effective advocate for Trump’s agenda.
She’s also reputedly on the shortlist to be Trump’s next attorney general.
So, what do we know about Harmeet Dhillon?
Although she’s taken on the investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson, in January Dhillon refused to investigate the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
Dhillon’s decision not to investigate Good’s killing marked a sharp departure from past Civil Rights Division chiefs, who have always moved quickly to probe shootings of civilians by law enforcement officials.
Four senior DOJ civil rights officials resigned over Dhillon’s refusal to investigate.
Dhillon also refused to assign civil rights attorneys to investigate the subsequent Minneapolis shooting death by two federal agents of Alex Pretti. Instead, she tapped a lawyer who handles civil investigations involving workplace discrimination.
Yet a few weeks after Good’s killing, Dhillon took on the investigation of a group of people (including journalist Don Lemon) who had protested Good’s shooting by disrupting a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The protesters had targeted the church because a pastor there, David Easterwood, was identified as the local ICE field office director.
Dhillon characterized the disruption as a “desecration of a house of worship” and therefore a violation of federal civil rights laws. By April, nearly 40 people faced federal charges in this case of conspiracy against the right of religious worship.
Dhillon has also been the force behind condemning universities for allowing what she deems “antisemitic” protests — and withholding research funding unless they agree to explicit measures supposedly to prevent antisemitism.
Last summer, the The New Yorker published an extensive piece on Dartmouth College titled “How Dartmouth Became the Ivy League’s Switzerland,” claiming that Dartmouth President Sian Beilock had successfully avoided Dhillon’s ire — and the federal funding cuts that have threatened Harvard and Columbia — by adopting a “neutral” position on Trump’s attempt to take greater control of higher education.
Dhillon calls Dartmouth “one of the good guys” in higher education. (Rather than neutral Switzerland during World War II, a more accurate analogy for Dartmouth’s response to Trump under Beilock would be Britain under Neville Chamberlain, who appeased Hitler.)
I was a Dartmouth trustee in the 1980s when its president, James O. Freedman, who was Jewish, endured the antisemitic barbs of an ascendant right-wing student group headed by Dhillon, then a Dartmouth student. (Other members included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza.)
In 1988, Dhillon, as editor of The Dartmouth Review, published a column depicting Freedman as Adolf Hitler under the headline “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann” — a play on a Nazi slogan, “One Empire, One People, One Leader,” but substituting and misspelling Freedman’s name for “Fuhrer.”
Using the analogy of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the column satirically described how “Der Freedmann” and his associates rid the campus of conservatives. The column referred to the “‘Final Solution’ of the Conservative Problem” and to “survivors” of the Dartmouth “holocaust” and described Dartmouth conservatives being “deported in cattle cars in the night.”
A drawing on the cover of the following issue of Dhillon’s Dartmouth Review also depicted Freedman, who had been critical of The Review, as Hitler.
I saw how much Dhillon’s publication hurt Freedman. As a Jew, he not only felt personally attacked but also worried about the effects of Dhillon’s publication on Jewish students at Dartmouth.
Granted, this was 1988. Dhillon’s history of publishing such antisemitic crap doesn’t necessarily cast her recent crusade against campus antisemitism as hypocritical. It’s possible that her undergraduate escapade into antisemitism caused her such remorse that she subsequently experienced a conversion of sorts and became committed to ridding universities of similar acts of bigotry.
But nothing in her history after Dartmouth or her official biography suggests such a conversion. The most probable explanation for her turnaround is simple ambition.
Dhillon grabbed the opportunity to become assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights and agreed to use the charge of antisemitism as a weapon to carry out the Trump regime’s war on prestigious universities — not because they’re hotbeds of antisemitism, but because the authoritarian right considers them hotbeds of leftist ideology.
JD Vance said in a 2021 speech titled “The Universities are the enemy,” that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” He never mentioned antisemitism.
Dhillon admits that her overall vision is not just slowing down civil rights in America but “turning the train around and driving in the opposite direction,” as she told the conservative Federalist Society after her appointment as head of the division.
She has eliminated federal oversight of police departments accused of discrimination, once the centerpiece of the Civil Rights Division’s work.
She has directed universities to end all types of affirmative action, once defended by the Civil Rights Division.
She is now suing states to acquire voter databases in an effort to disenfranchise minority voters. The Civil Rights Division once existed to protect their voting rights.
Harmeet Dhillon is no advocate for civil rights. She’s a legal hack for Trump’s cruel agenda of attacking Americans trying to stop ICE and Border Patrol agents from doing their worst, of seeking to destroy academic freedom in American universities in favor of Trump’s narrow view of what should be allowed, of undermining equal opportunity for people of color, and of prosecuting anyone — like Cassidy Hutchinson — with the courage and integrity to stand up against Trump’s despotism.
Harmeet Dhillon is the last person who should be running the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. She should never become attorney general — which means Trump will probably nominate her.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org
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