Harmeet Dhillon: DoJ lawyer a top contender for Trump’s retribution mission

Harmeet Dhillon greets Donald Trump at an event in California in September 2019. Photograph: Paul Chinn/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

The civil rights division is now “nothing more than a shadow of its former self”, said Kristen Clarke, who was Dhillon’s predecessor and led the division during the Biden administration. “The division has abandoned its mission to fight hate crimes, human trafficking, law enforcement misconduct, voter suppression, redlining, and much more. This division has left millions of Americans vulnerable to predatory attacks and discrimination from those who would seek to take us back to a time where civil rights did not exist,” she said.

Now, Dhillon is rumored to be under consideration to be the associate attorney general, the number three official at the department, a position from which she would be responsible for overseeing all of the department’s civil litigation, according to CBS News and Bloomberg Law. She might even be the next attorney general.

If Trump is looking for someone willing to undertake his retribution campaign, Dhillon has the résumé. The civil rights division is overseeing an investigation into Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide who gave vivid testimony to the January 6 committee about the president’s actions on that day (it is unclear what civil rights violation, if any, Hutchinson committed). She is also overseeing the high-profile prosecution of the journalist Don Lemon and protesters who interrupted a church service in St Paul in January. The justice department on Monday also fired a veteran civil rights prosecutor who oversaw a criminal case against anti-abortion protesters and released a widely criticized report on efforts to prosecute anti-abortion protesters.

“She would direct the Department of Justice to be acting even more at the direction of the president and his priorities than DoJ already has been, and I find that to be extremely alarming,” said Ejaz Baluch, Jr, a former lawyer in the civil rights division who left last year.

“The vast majority of what the division has done has been in line with what the president wants.”

Dismantling the division

Dhillon was confirmed by the Senate in a 52-45 vote in April last year, and immediately began sweeping changes at the division. A little more than two weeks after her confirmation, she sent out a memo to the different sections with new “mission statements” announcing new priorities. They were a sharp departure from the longstanding focuses of the division. Core civil rights laws like the Voting Rights Act and Fair Housing Act were barely mentioned, instead replaced with priorities like preventing voter fraud, anti-transgender issues, and preventing discrimination against white people.

Dhillon also removed the career lawyers serving as chiefs in many of the sections, involuntarily reassigning attorneys with decades of experience in civil rights to little-known offices to do bureaucratic work. Attorneys began to quit in droves, a development Dhillon celebrated.

“Over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine, because we don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence, or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence,” she said during a podcast interview. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”

But as Dhillon celebrated an exodus of supposed wokeness from the department, officials quietly asked some departing career attorneys if they would reconsider and stay. Lawyers who were exiled to the low-level offices as part of an effort to quit were also asked if they would consider returning to their sections. The justice department has since replaced those career prosecutors with attorneys who are ideologically aligned with the president, some of whom have little experience in civil rights law.

Dhillon prepares for her confirmation hearing in February last year. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Asked in an interview with the Dartmouth alumni magazine last year whether the turnover meant she would be able to leave a stamp on the agency, Dhillon said: “That’s the goal.”

Before Dhillon was confirmed, one of her deputies, Michael Gates, had one-on-one meetings with attorneys to learn about their background. Baluch said Gates told him he was doing the meeting at Dhillon’s request and asked Baluch which judge he had clerked for and his opinion about memos Pam Bondi released when she arrived at the department (several of those memos attacked DEI).

Baluch got the sense he was being vetted for his political ideology. He said: “To me, that signals that even before she was confirmed by the Senate, she had a plan in place to vet everyone for ideological purity and to get rid of everyone who did not meet that standard.”

Gates did not respond to requests to be interviewed.

And once she arrived, Dhillon did not really interact with the career staff in the division. When Clarke, Dhillon’s predecessor, took over the division, she would come to section meetings, held office hours, and introduced herself to employees, said Dena Robinson, a career attorney in the employment litigation section who left the division last year.

Rank-and-file staff attorneys barely spoke to Dhillon until the division’s holiday party in December.

“People. Don’t talk shop at holiday parties. Don’t ask me about that long email you sent in August. It’s barbaric. Have some decency,” Dhillon tweeted the night of the day the party was held.

Investigation by tweet

Dhillon, who has 1.3m followers on her personal account, has also kept up a prolific presence on X; her financial disclosure showed she received at least $5,000 from X for content creation before joining the justice department (her ethics agreement since joining bars her from continuing to get paid). In December last year, she complained about the number of followers she had on the site. “I’ve been stuck at the same level of followers on this account pretty much since I started my government job. What, am I chopped liver over here?” she posted in December. “What kind of content do my folks want to see more of to like and share?”

Dhillon also posts official department letters on X announcing civil rights investigations, a highly unusual practice that has alarmed former civil rights division lawyers.

Last May, for example, Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson spoke about the number of high ranking Black people in his administration. “What I’m saying is: when you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else,” said Johnson, who is Black. “Having people in my administration that will look out for the interest of everyone, and everyone means you have to look out for the interests of Black folks, because that hasn’t happened.” The next day, the civil rights division’s official account posted a letter from Dhillon informing Johnson he was under investigation for violating a provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination based on race.

Brandon Johnson, the Chicago mayor, with Illinois governor JB Pritzker and US congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi. Photograph: Nam Y Huh/AP

In December, shortly after a local news outlet published a story about a Pennsylvania school bus driver being fired for posting an “English only” sign on her bus, Dhillon posted she had directed the civil rights division to open an investigation into “this situation implicating DEI wokeness”.

Determining whether there is enough predicate to open an investigation is a complex task that can take months, but Dhillon seemed to be opening investigations days after learning about something. With a few exceptions, the civil rights division also does not publicly announce it is investigating something, let alone release the letter informing someone they are the target of an investigation.

“It is drilled into you from the moment that you start the job, that you cannot reveal non-public confidential information, especially about investigations,” Robinson said. “When Harmeet came in and took to announcing investigations on social media before jurisdictions had received a notice letter, [it] was just an extreme departure from how things normally had been done.”

Political leadership in the division also did not seem to care that much about whether there was enough evidence to merit filing cases. When Baluch was assigned to investigate antisemitism in the University of California system last year, he said he and his colleagues were told by one of Dhillon’s deputies they had 30 days to investigate and were expected to produce a draft lawsuit at the end of that period. Such an investigation would typically take place for well over a year, according to Baluch, and the justice department would not typically file a lawsuit unless it uncovered strong facts that merited one. “We’re under a lot of pressure to bring this case,” a Dhillon deputy said in a meeting, according to Baluch.

The comment was pretty clear evidence to Baluch the White House or justice department leadership was directing the effort.

When teams in the field began reporting back that they did not see facts that would merit a lawsuit, Gates asked them why there was not already enough evidence in the public record through news reports to file an investigation. That suggestion stunned Baluch.

“We don’t want to use the weight of the federal government to sue someone unless we have direct evidence that the law has been violated,” he said. “Simply relying on news reports does not give us as much reliability as talking to witnesses ourselves, looking at documents ourselves and examining the evidence on our own to determine whether the law has been violated.” The justice department sued UCLA earlier this year on antisemitism allegations after the school rejected a $1bn fine and other concessions.

In the past, when career attorneys disagreed with a decision about a case, they could have a meeting with political leadership to air their concerns. That didn’t appear to happen under Dhillon – attorneys were simply told to dismiss cases, several former division attorneys said. It “was very clear we were not going to have any say with Ms Dhillon. She was going to be making her decisions unilaterally,” said Brian McEntire, a former civil rights division attorney in the employment litigation section.

‘My superpower is not really caring what people think about me’

Before she arrived at the justice department, Dhillon was well connected to the Republican party in California. In 2020, she served as a co-chair of Lawyers for Trump, a perch from which she worked on lawsuits contesting the election results and frequently appeared on television as Trump and allies spread the false claim the 2020 election was stolen. During one appearance, she suggested the president’s supreme court appointees would save the election for him.

“We’re waiting for the United States supreme court which the president has nominated three justices to step in and do something and, hopefully, Amy Coney Barrett will come through and pick it up,” she said during an interview on Lou Dobbs Tonight on Fox Business shortly after election day.

After the 2020 election, Dhillon’s firm defended Trump and several close aides in litigation related to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The firm also successfully defended Trump against an effort to use a novel interpretation of the 14th amendment to get him disqualified from the 2024 presidential ballot. David Warrington, who now serves as White House counsel, was a managing partner at the firm.

Before coming into Trump’s orbit, she served as the chair of the Republican party in San Francisco, a liberal bastion, and twice ran unsuccessfully for heavily Democratic state legislative seats. She became vice-chair of the California Republican party and an RNC committee member. She held what used to be fairly standard positions in the Republican party: accepting Roe v Wade, supporting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, and saying she did not want the government to interfere in same-sex marriages. She also at one point urged the RNC to diversify.

“It’s not enough to just grab people who happen to be Indian from the street and bring them on stage and stage a photograph,” Dhillon told the Los Angeles Times in 2013. “It has to be genuine.”

Dhillon, who is Sikh, has also faced racist attacks from fellow Republicans over her faith. In 2013, a fellow California Republican was condemned by the party after writing on Facebook that Dhillon was not really a Republican. “I was told by one of Harmeet’s friends that because of her religion, her loyalty is to the Muslim religion,” the Republican wrote, mistakenly conflating Sikhs and Muslims. “So she will defend a Muslim beheading two men without any hesitation.”

Harmeet Dhillon gives the benediction at the end of the first day of the 2024 Republican convention in Milwaukee. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

When she first ran to be vice-chair of the California Republican party, there were inflammatory whispers she might slaughter a goat at the lectern. She also delivered a Sikh prayer at the Republican national convention in 2024 that was met with online hate from some on the right.

Born in India, Dhillon moved to the UK, then New York, before settling in rural Smithfield, North Carolina. She told the Los Angeles Times in 2016 she “was not popular at all”: “I had two long braids and a funny name and my mother didn’t dress me in fashionable clothes.”

“There were Klan signs on the highway where I grew up. I’m used to being an outsider. My superpower is not really caring what people think about me,” she told the Dartmouth alumni magazine last year.

She graduated high school when she was 16 and enrolled at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and joined the Dartmouth Review, a conservative publication. The conservative weekly became embroiled in controversy after three staff members were suspended for confronting a Black professor. The students later sued the school, claiming they were being discriminated against because they were white. After the president of the college criticized the outlet, the Review published a column comparing him to Hitler, which was criticized as antisemitic. Dhillon publicly defended the column, telling the New York Times it was intended to show how conservative students had been mistreated.

After the 9/11 attacks, Dhillon spoke out against discrimination against Sikhs who faced discrimination and suspicion as they traveled at airports. “On one hand, I say I am an American and can empathize,” she observed in an interview at the time, “but on the other I wonder why white Americans, who look like [Oklahoma City bomber] Timothy McVeigh, aren’t being searched?” she told India Abroad in 2001. She joined the board of directors for the ACLU chapter in northern California.

But two decades later, she gained national attention for advocating for pursuing a different kind of anti-discrimination. In 2018, she represented Google engineer James Damore, who was fired from the tech giant after he wrote a memo explaining that physiological differences between men and women could explain why there were fewer female engineers. A class action lawsuit filed on behalf of Damore and other employees alleged the company discriminated against them because they were conservative and either white or Asian. The case was dropped in 2020. It’s not known what the terms of any settlement were.

Full of errors

Dhillon’s take-no-prisoners approach and presence on social media have earned her plaudits from Trump and other conservative figures. “Harmeet Dhillon is here. She sues the ass off of anybody that is antisemitic. She’s doing a lot of them right now. Harvard wished they never heard her name, right? They’re going to pay a lot of money, right, Harmeet? Going to pay a lot of money,” Trump said at a Hanukah reception at the White House last year. The rightwing influencerMike Cernovich tweeted in December that Dhillon was “putting points on the board”.

While observers have expressed alarm at the direction Dhillon has taken the division in, it has also not gone unnoticed that the division has at times been beset by sloppy lawyering.

Last July, as Trump pushed Texas to redraw its congressional map to benefit Republicans, Dhillon sent a letter to Texas governor Greg Abbott and attorney general Ken Paxton saying that the justice department had concluded that four congressional districts in the state were unconstitutional because lawmakers had taken race into account too much when drawing. The letter was seen as a thinly veiled effort to justify redrawing the districts and caused immediate headaches for lawyers in Texas who had been arguing in litigation they did not take race into account at all when drawing the maps.

Texas would eventually redraw the maps, and a three-judge panel struck down the revised plan in November. The court noted that even attorneys working for the Texas attorney general’s office called the letter “unsound”, “baseless”, “erroneous”, “ham-fisted”, and “a mess”. “It’s challenging to unpack the DoJ letter because it contains so many factual, legal, and typographical errors,” US district judge Jeffrey Brown wrote in his ruling. The US supreme court eventually let the map go into effect.

One of the pillars of Dhillon’s work at the justice department has been the civil rights division’s efforts to get comprehensive voter roll information from all 50 states. The department is currently suing dozens of them to get the information, and Dhillon frequently talks about the dozens of lawsuits the department has filed.

But the department has not actually won any of those lawsuits. Judges in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have dismissed the lawsuits, saying the department does not have a sound legal basis for getting the information. And a court in Georgia dismissed the lawsuit seeking voter information there because the department filed the suit in the wrong jurisdiction.

When they sought to obtain Oklahoma’s voter rolls, justice department attorneys repeatedly emailed an incorrect address to try and get information. In Washington state, justice department attorneys struggled to properly serve the lawsuit to state officials, a basic first step in litigation. In a lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia, a justice department lawyer accidentally left editing notes in the margins of a filed document. In Rhode Island, the acting chief of the voting section told a judge the department hadn’t yet analyzed voter roll data it had obtained from states that had willingly turned it over. Days later he filed a notice with the court saying the department had in fact begun to analyze the information.

Given all of those errors, it did not go unnoticed when Dhillon posted on X in February that hiring materials with typos in them belonged in the trash.

“If your letter for a law job has typos in it, circular file,” she posted on 27 February. “You are not ready for a legal job.”