Former DOJ lawyer claims Trump administration misused investigations targeting Harvard, Brown and Columbia

Washington — The Trump administration pressured its career civil rights attorneys to investigate allegations of antisemitism at the university campuses of Harvard, Columbia and Brown even though there was no factual or legal basis to do so, according to a former Justice Department attorney.

Haley Van Erem, a longtime lawyer at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, accused political leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services and DOJ of improperly pushing staff to issue adverse findings against all three schools as part of a whistleblower complaint made public on Tuesday by Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin.

Before leaving the department, Van Erem was one of several DOJ attorneys who were involuntarily detailed to HHS to help investigate allegations of antisemitism on college campuses.

“Senior officials at DOJ and HHS departed from longstanding investigative practices designed to ensure due process, accuracy and legal compliance. Ms. Van Erem and her colleagues encountered compressed timelines to conduct investigations that compromised the ability to ensure that findings were justified and accurate,” her attorneys from the Government Accountability Project wrote in a letter to members of Congress that accompanied a copy of her complaint.

“For at least some of the investigations, there was little to no factual predicate justifying opening them. When they asked questions, raised legal concerns, or sought to document their objections, they were sometimes admonished and their concerns were often disregarded,” the letter said. “Taken together, these circumstances led the attorneys reasonably to believe that certain enforcement outcomes had been determined before the relevant evidence was collected and evaluated.”

A Justice Department spokesperson denied the allegations, and said that Van Erem was not involved in those specific investigations.

“While at the DOJ, Ms. Haley Van Erem did not work on university investigations. And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations,” the spokesperson said.

WTX US News has reached out to HHS for comment.

The whistleblower complaint was made public just days after a federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Harvard accusing the school of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students. 

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns in Massachusetts found that instances of alleged discrimination cited by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to support federal civil rights violations of Title VI, which prohibits discrimination by entities that receive federal funding.

Unlike Harvard, which litigated the case, Brown and Columbia settled with the federal government to resolve similar Title VI allegations over antisemitism and have their federal funding restored. 

WTX US News has reached out to Harvard, Brown and Columbia for comment.

Van Erem’s whistleblower complaint was submitted to the inspectors general for DOJ and HHS, as well as the Office of Special Counsel. It lays bare concerns that are widely shared by many longtime former Civil Rights Division attorneys about the politicization of civil rights investigations under the leadership of Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general who leads the division.

Dhillon has upended many of the traditional approaches by the division to investigate discrimination against people of color, in favor of other priorities that have included cracking down on campuses that allowed pro-Palestinian protests, investigating the use of diversity, equity and inclusion policies on college campuses and establishing a section solely devoted to the protection of gun rights.

According to the whistleblower complaint, attorneys assigned to investigate Brown did not substantiate any violations of Title VI, instead determining the school had promptly and effectively responded to the handful of incidents that occurred. Despite this finding, the government nevertheless pressed for and entered into a settlement with the school, the complaint said.

In the Columbia probe, meanwhile, the complaint said staff were pressed to issue findings against the school on an accelerated timeframe and before the factual and legal review was complete. As a result, her lawyers said the government relied on “allegations that were unsupported” as well as “news reports or litigation filings” and activities that were protected by the First Amendment.

Finally, in the Harvard case, the complaint said that DOJ attorneys raised grave legal concerns after the government moved to cut off the school’s funding prematurely and sought a settlement before any investigation had been completed.

“The outcomes of the investigations were predetermined, without regard to the evidence,” her attorneys wrote in her whistleblower complaint. “Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded.”

In a letter to Dhillon, Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, asked her to hand over certain communications and records related to the federal investigations into the three schools.

“Antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real. It needs to be addressed seriously. But your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature,” he wrote in his letter on Tuesday.

“Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications,” he added.