A former Justice Department civil rights attorney says the Trump administration's antisemitism investigations into three Ivy League schools were rigged from the start — with settlements demanded before the evidence was even in.
According to MS NOW, Haley Van Erem, who spent nearly a decade in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division before joining the antisemitism task force and departing in May 2025, told Congress the findings against Harvard, Brown and Columbia were "predetermined" by political priorities that blew past standard investigative procedures.
Her complaint says "hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations," and that investigators' actual conclusions were "frequently disregarded."
At Brown, whistleblower Van Erem's disclosure says investigators "did not find evidence to support a violation of Title VI," yet DOJ leadership "refused to permit a notice of no violation and instead sought some form of settlement." Brown ultimately agreed to spend $50 million on Rhode Island workforce development; Columbia agreed to pay $200 million over three years. Neither school admitted wrongdoing.
Harvard refused to settle and won. U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns dismissed the DOJ's lawsuit last week, ruling the administration's claims relied on incidents "too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference" that Harvard violated civil rights law.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the House Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, wrote to Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon that the whistleblower account exposed a "large-scale fraud."
"Antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real. But your 'investigation' into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature," Raskin wrote, according to MS NOW's Ken Dilanian.
