dhillon, harmeet esq
PRIMARY 7 26 THREAT POLL OFFICIALS ALIEN VOTE
BAILLED 11 26 PENSION?
trifecta trump trans 2 ACADEMIC SUPPRESSION
GOP STEAL ELECTION MICH 5 26 TINA PERERS EMERG
ACTIV SUPPRESS ACADEMIC SUPPRESS
PRESS SUPPRESS DON LEMON NSPM7?
VOTER SUPPRESS
VRA AMICUS FUCKERY SAUER CLERK
BIG LIE CONSPIRACY
SEE RESIGN PROTEST ICE
NATCON SHOCK TROOPS
SEE BONDI DOJ 3 ED FUCKING MARTIN
FAIL 5
HILLSDALE
TARRIO PROUD
VOTER DATA
SEE KARI VOA?
REG CAPTURE AGY NEUTER
LEO?
PENSION BENCH? EG SAUER AM 1ST LEGAL MILLER
BAK
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AN 11 26
Before she left the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon launched the prosecution of several Americans who protested in a Minneapolis church, as well as the reporters there who covered the protest. She claimed that she brought the suit through the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice because those involved were anti-Christian. A court filing flips that argument on its head.
Nekima Levy Armstrong submitted a supplement to the record on Tuesday, making it clear that the threats the Justice Department alleges she was making were actually quotes from the Bible.
National security analyst Marcy Wheeler spotted the detail in the new filing that alleges the DOJ not only misquoted what Levy Armstrong said, but also appeared to miss that it was based in Christian teachings.
Levy Armstrong is alleged to have said, "The time for judgment has come," which was used to support the DOJ's claim that she was issuing a threat.
"A review of the grand jury testimony of pastor Parnell indicates that the Superseding Indictment inaccurately paraphrased the alleged statement and took it out of context," said the filing.
Parnell testified, "And then she [Levy Armstrong] said, 'We're, we're here to bring judgment and judgment begins in the House of God,' which I recognize as quoting scripture from 1st Peter 4."
The quote Parnell was referring to from 1 Peter 4 reads, "For it is time for judgment to begin with God's household; and 1 if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God?"
He made it clear that he viewed the comment from her as her quoting scripture, not as her making a threat.
The filing also said that the government is alleging that Levy Armstrong said that she was a Christian and there to bring judgment.
Parnell said he "felt compelled to publicly rebuke her for that. So I said to her, 'Shame on you, shame on you to do this. This is the House of God. We're here to worship and you may leave.'"
Levy Armstrong's lawyer explained that she denies saying this. "Further, none of the audio recordings of the interaction between Parnell and Levy Armstrong provided by the government or obtained by the defense include such a statement. The defense, however, accepts that the question of whether she made the statement is a factual issue that cannot be resolved by the Court at this time."
The filing also said that she never heard Parnell ask her to leave the church and that none of the audio recordings from the government appear to have captured Parnell saying this either.
"The defense, however, accepts that the question of whether he made the statement is a factual issue that cannot be resolved by the Court at this time," the filing added again.
The filing goes on to say that there is a big difference between someone declaring "the time for judgment has come" and "we are here to bring judgment and judgment begins in the House of God."
The lawyers explain that the statement from the Gospel indicates that judgment ultimately comes from God and that the demonstrators weren't there to impose any kind of punishment.
Wheeler pointed out that there are several times that the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ appeared to miss that the Christians were quoting scripture back and forth with each other. So, accusing them of being anti-Christian or specifically targeting Christians to commit a hate crime doesn't hold up.
Parnell also doesn't state that it was a threat in his testimony; it was a conclusion made by the government. In fact, he didn't feel so threatened that he could publicly rebuke Leavy Armstrong from the pulpit.
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DOCKET 11 26
Harmeet Dhillon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump who led the administration to an uninterrupted string of courtroom defeats in its crusade for states’ unredacted voter rolls, has resigned as head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Civil Rights Division.
Attorney General Todd Blanche announced her exit in a statement on social media.
Dhillon’s tenure leaves behind an aggressive anti-voting agenda whose most prominent objectives largely failed. Under her leadership, the division abandoned or withdrew from lawsuits defending voting rights, while veteran attorneys were reassigned and resources increasingly shifted toward investigating allegations of voter fraud.
Her departure comes just two days after Democrats swept the midterm elections, thwarting the administration’s efforts to preserve Republican control of Congress through an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting campaign that Dhillon helped set in motion.
Under Dhillon’s stewardship, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sharply shifted away from its traditional mission of protecting the right to vote and toward aggressive federal intervention into state elections. Its Voting Section became the driving force behind efforts to obtain sensitive voter data, investigate alleged voter fraud and threaten state election officials.
But those efforts repeatedly faced resistance from state governments and federal judges.
In 2025, Dhillon directed Voting Section attorneys to reach out to states demanding copies of their unredacted voter-registration lists, including confidential information such as voters’ driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers.
The unprecedented effort drew objections from election officials of both parties, who challenged the department’s authority to collect sensitive information and warned of federal interference in state-run elections.
When states refused to turn over the data, the DOJ sued 30 states and Washington, D.C. But the department has now suffered 27 consecutive district-court defeats, without a single win requiring any state to hand over the data.
Even judges appointed by Trump have rejected the department’s arguments.
The department has appealed many of those decisions, and some states have voluntarily provided voter information. But its central legal theory has failed in every district court to reach a ruling.
Dhillon also oversaw the DOJ’s efforts to work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create a national voter database using private voter information, part of the administration’s campaign to identify alleged noncitizen voters.
Her influence also extended to congressional redistricting.
In July 2025, Dhillon sent Texas officials a letter claiming that four Democratic-held congressional districts were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders and urging the state to redraw them.
Days later, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to redraw the state’s congressional map, citing constitutional concerns raised by the DOJ. The resulting plan was designed to help Republicans capture five additional Democratic-held seats in the 2026 midterms.
But Tuesday’s election dealt a fatal setback to that strategy.
Republicans won just one of the five seats they targeted, while Democrats flipped two Republican-held Texas districts that had not been redrawn. The GOP emerged with fewer Texas House seats than it held before redistricting — the opposite of the outcome Trump had sought.
The broader Republican redistricting offensive also failed to prevent Democrats from winning control of the House.
Dhillon also personally pressed Fulton County, Georgia, for records from the 2020 presidential election, which Trump claims was stolen. Soon, the FBI seized election materials from the county as part of a federal criminal investigation. Fulton County officials later argued in court that the administration was using criminal investigative powers to obtain records the DOJ had struggled to secure through civil litigation.
In the final months before the midterms, Dhillon orchestrated the largest election-monitoring operation in DOJ history, dispatching approximately 1,000 monitors and observers to all 50 states on Election Day.
The unprecedented deployment, concentrated heavily in Democratic-leaning jurisdictions, came under scrutiny from voting rights advocates and state officials concerned about federal interference. Isolated reports of monitors exceeding their authority emerged in Michigan and New Mexico, prompting officials to contact the DOJ.
But the operation did not produce any publicly announced findings of voter fraud.
Dhillon’s tenure was also deeply destructive to the Civil Rights Division. Hundreds of career attorneys departed the division as it abandoned longstanding civil rights enforcement priorities and redirected resources toward the administration’s agenda.
Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden and now serves as the NAACP’s general counsel, condemned Dhillon’s tenure as a repudiation of the division’s mission.
“From day one, Harmeet Dhillon abdicated her responsibility to enforce our nation’s federal civil rights laws and destroyed the crown jewel of the Justice Department,” Clarke said. “Instead of protecting the civil rights of all Americans, she abandoned cases, purged the work force and weaponized the Division to target institutions to achieve illegitimate, partisan goals.”
Clarke said the fight to protect civil rights would continue beyond Dhillon’s departure, warning her eventual successor: “We will continue to demand that you respect the agency’s sacred mission, enforce the law fairly, and protect our civil rights.”
Stacey Young, executive director of Justice Connection, an organization of former DOJ employees, also denounced Dhillon’s record in a statement Thursday.
“Harmeet Dhillon has been the most destructive, lawless, and hateful head of the Civil Rights Division in DOJ history,” Young said. “After she upended the division’s mission-critical work, the civil servants who dedicated their careers to protecting vulnerable communities were instead told to target them – and more than three-quarters of the division’s lawyers left.”
Young also criticized Dhillon for ending investigations into police departments and abandoning proposed consent decrees with cities including Minneapolis and Louisville, which would have required reforms to address alleged patterns excessive force and discriminatory practices. Young also faulted Dhillon for declining to open investigations into shootings involving federal immigration agents.
“Americans’ civil rights don’t enforce themselves,” Young said. “For almost 70 years, the Civil Rights Division brought to fruition the civil rights laws that Americans demanded. Dhillon decimated it.”
In resigning, Dhillon leaves behind unresolved lawsuits over voter data, ongoing federal election investigations and a Civil Rights Division profoundly changed from the institution she inherited in April 2025.
The future of the department’s election agenda also remains uncertain.
Justice Connection called on the incoming Senate to closely scrutinize Dhillon’s successor and ensure the next leader enforces federal civil-rights laws fairly.
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an 1026
A Republican election official says she is being threatened with investigation and criminal liability after defying the Trump administration's demands, warning that threats to American elections are now coming from inside the federal government.
Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the heavily Republican state, revealed the extraordinary pressure she has faced to give up sensitive voter information during an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes.
Henderson states that election officials are usually threatened with attacks on election integrity coming from non-governmental actors and cyber criminals, but is now receiving pressure from the President Donald Trump administration.
"In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said to correspondent Lesley Stahl before adding, “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government."
She said the Justice Department unlawfully demanded that states surrender their complete voter registration lists, including confidential information which is protected under state law.
Henderson said officials were asked to provide Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver's license numbers. She said federal authorities did not offer any reasonable explanation for their demands or how they planned to use the information. Henderson and 29 other states from both parties refused to give in to the demands.
After the refusal, she received a September letter from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division stating she was under investigation and involved in ongoing litigation over compliance with federal election laws. The department also threatened her with potential criminal or civil liability if she did not preserve the voting records. The dispute came after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking Utah's voter data.
The Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended Henderson after the letter became public.
"It is wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law," Cox wrote at the time.
Trump administration officials have argued the voter records are necessary to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told CBS that there are potentially thousands of cases under investigation.
But Henderson said Utah's own review found just 52 questionable registrations out of more than 2 million voters. The administration has sued states that refused to provide complete voter lists, even as officials say privacy laws protect the data they seek.
This warning comes at a time when a broader federal campaign is underway, including the seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia and legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voting. The California secretary of state has challenged the government's evidence and said it is threatening eligible voters.
Henderson has no plans to back down from the threats and said she will continue to resist the DOJ’s requests.
"I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right," she said, continuing: "I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to."
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Harmeet Dhillon speaking to reporters, surrounded by cameras and recording devices.
Under its chief, Harmeet Dhillon, the civil rights division of the Justice Department has pushed hard to replenish the ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for top legal talent.
By Glenn Thrush
Reporting from Washington
Oct. 6, 2026
A former prosecutor forced off a high-profile murder case for peeking at the defense team’s strategy documents.
A onetime gambling executive who promoted conspiracy theories about the Las Vegas massacre in 2017.
A Florida activist who once served 20 days in jail for hacking a local elections system.
They are among the 130 lawyers who have recently joined the Justice Department’s short-staffed civil rights division as the Trump administration has struggled to fill the depleted ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for legal talent. Since early 2025, upward of 300 nonpolitical career employees, representing decades of experience, have left the division after its leader, Harmeet Dhillon, repurposed it to pursue President Trump’s agenda.
As a consequence, the division has opened its doors to recruits, many of them conservatives, some with education and work histories that might have disqualified them from being hired in the past, former officials said. Some have left a trail of hyperpartisan, conspiratorial and, in some instances, bizarre statements, according to an examination of about a dozen recent hires based on court records, social media posts and interviews.
Department officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said they have rejected nearly as many applicants as they have hired, 126. Any ideological tilt in the career ranks, they added, reflected the Trump-era applicant pool, which includes conservative activists and recent law school graduates.
Ms. Dhillon praised the quality of the new lawyers, and said she was revamping a division that had been dominated by liberals for far too long....
They are among the 130 lawyers who have recently joined the Justice Department’s short-staffed civil rights division as the Trump administration has struggled to fill the depleted ranks of a unit that was once a magnet for legal talent. Since early 2025, upward of 300 nonpolitical career employees, representing decades of experience, have left the division after its leader, Harmeet Dhillon, repurposed it to pursue President Trump’s agenda.
As a consequence, the division has opened its doors to recruits, many of them conservatives, some with education and work histories that might have disqualified them from being hired in the past, former officials said. Some have left a trail of hyperpartisan, conspiratorial and, in some instances, bizarre statements, according to an examination of about a dozen recent hires based on court records, social media posts and interviews.
Department officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said they have rejected nearly as many applicants as they have hired, 126. Any ideological tilt in the career ranks, they added, reflected the Trump-era applicant pool, which includes conservative activists and recent law school graduates.
Ms. Dhillon praised the quality of the new lawyers, and said she was revamping a division that had been dominated by liberals for far too long.
“For years, the civil rights division recruited from a narrow pipeline of progressive activists and called it excellence,” she said in a statement.
“We are hiring trial lawyers,” she added. “The attorneys The Times singled out have collectively tried hundreds of cases, prosecuted those who prey on trafficked children, won at the Supreme Court and practiced law for decades. That is the experience this division needs to enforce civil rights laws for every American.”
Among her top hires: The gun rights activist Barry Arrington, the acting chief of a new Second Amendment unit, is a high-profile opponent of the theory of evolution and same-sex marriage. Last year, he successfully challenged Colorado’s ban on so-called conversion therapy before the Supreme Court.
The person she appointed to temporarily lead the voting section — the epicenter of the department’s aggressive actions ahead of the midterm elections — is Eric Neff, who tried more than 50 criminal cases during a 12-year career as a prosecutor in California. His stint as a prosecutor in Los Angeles County ended in rancor.
In 2022, Mr. Neff was placed on administrative leave after the office withdrew his indictment of an executive at a software company for storing data on poll workers on a Chinese server. His bosses cited irregularities in the case. The county ended up paying the company $5 million in a settlement.
Mr. Neff was reinstated in 2024 and has filed a whistle-blower claim against the county, which remains unresolved.
Questions for individual prosecutors and officials were routed to the Justice Department’s public affairs office, in keeping with longstanding policy. A department spokeswoman, Kiersten Pels, defended Mr. Neff’s appointment, citing his experience, “50 jury trials in cases ranging from fraud to multiple homicides” and his earlier career as an investigative reporter.
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Barry Arrington representing the gun advocacy group Rocky Mountain Gun Owners in Denver in 2019. He is now the acting chief of a new Second Amendment unit in the Justice Department’s civil rights division.Credit...David Zalubowski/Associated Press
Critics have raised questions about lawyers assigned to crack down on voter fraud, which includes a thus-far unsuccessful effort to obtain sensitive state voter roll information, and the deployment of 1,000 election monitors across the country.
On the day of Minnesota’s primary elections in August, two Justice Department officials approached a polling place in Minneapolis and were reminded by a local election worker to obey a law requiring them to stay outside at a certain distance, a video showed.
One of the department officials, David Michael Levin, a conservative lawyer and businessman, was himself a convicted lawbreaker.
In 2015 and 2016, Mr. Levin twice hacked into the Lee County, Fla., election system as a political stunt. He faced felony charges before pleading to a pair of misdemeanors in September 2016, and served a 20-day jail sentence with two years of probation, according to court records.
His application, like all the others, was reviewed and approved by the department’s personnel office. His record alone would not have precluded him from being hired — the department is allowed after seven years to hire people who committed misdemeanors. But critics said it set a dangerous precedent.
“Deploying politically motivated individuals to carry out D.O.J.’s poll-monitoring efforts threatens to undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process ahead,” Senator Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Ms. Dhillon last month after seeing the video.
In recent years, Mr. Levin and his wife have been associated with a company that provides customer leads to insurance companies, and have been embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with a client who accused them of providing unusable leads, court records showed.
Judges in the case repeatedly called out the Levins for not turning over documents demanded by the court. In April 2026, a district court judge in Florida cited them for “willful and bad faith disregard” of court orders, rules and discovery procedures, according to court filings.
In August, the court ordered Mr. Levin to pay more than $200,000 in damages and lawyers fees, finding that he had engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation and civil conspiracy, according to a ruling last month. The docket shows no record yet of the Levins filing an appeal.
Mr. Levin’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. (None of the prosecutors mentioned in this story, including Mr. Levin, responded to personal requests for comment.)
The Justice Department official accompanying Mr. Levin also had a notable history. He is William Mohrman, a lawyer in Minnesota who represented Minneapolis police officers charged in connection with the murder of George Floyd. He has also represented the civil rights division in voter roll cases.
Another lawyer working on elections litigation is David Vandenberg, who joined as a criminal trial attorney in the civil rights division in August 2025.
For several years, Mr. Vandenberg served as a prosecutor in Texas and New Mexico. His 22-month stint as an assistant district attorney in El Paso appears to have been a troubled one: He faced serious complaints about his volatile behavior toward colleagues, his former supervisor said, allegations earlier reported by Bloomberg Law.
In an interview with The New York Times, his former supervisor, Penny Hamilton, recalled intervening after two incidents of yelling. In one, Mr. Vandenberg berated a co-worker during a dispute over a photocopier. In another, a local judge barred Mr. Vandenberg from a courtroom after he chided a court official.
Asked if Mr. Vandenberg should have been hired by the Justice Department, Ms. Hamilton replied, “No,” then amended her statement to, “Hell, no.”
He is currently facing charges of animal neglect, according to El Paso municipal court records, charges often filed when dogs are found unattended for an extended period in a parked vehicle.
In 2025, a cellphone photo of Mr. Vandenberg appeared on a news station after a local mother accused him of intentionally sideswiping her car, with her two young children inside, flashing his district attorney badge and fleeing the scene. He was not charged. The woman is currently suing him over the incident.
Ms. Pels defended Mr. Vandenberg’s record. He is “a dedicated prosecutor who spent years in New Mexico and Texas prosecuting cases on behalf of child victims of human trafficking, sexual assault and murder,” she said.
An official with knowledge of his hiring who requested anonymity to discuss personnel matters said that he had never been reprimanded by his previous employer, that he had denied wrongdoing and that he expected both matters to be resolved soon.
Khalil H. Quinan was hired in May as a prosecutor in the civil rights division’s criminal unit after nearly a decade in the Florida state attorney’s office, where he handled a range of gun, gang and violent crime cases.
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Khalil H. Quinan presenting evidence in a court hearing in Miami in 2022. He had to step aside as a lead prosecutor in a 2025 murder trial after the judge ruled he viewed and shared privileged defense communications.Credit...Pedro Portal/Miami Herald
In 2025, Mr. Quinan was forced to step aside as a lead prosecutor in the murder trial of Courtney Clenney, an OnlyFans model accused of killing her boyfriend, after the judge ruled that he viewed and shared iCloud files explicitly marked as privileged communications between Ms. Clenney’s parents and defense lawyers.
The judge dismissed Mr. Quinan’s claim that the material was permissible because it did not directly involve Ms. Clenney. In February 2025, the judge ordered him to sit for a sworn deposition after finding a second possible violation of attorney-client privilege. He withdrew from the case soon afterward.
Mr. Quinan was not disciplined. Ms. Clenney eventually reached a plea deal to serve six years in prison.
Ms. Pels said the Justice Department stood by the hiring of Mr. Quinan, describing him as a top-flight prosecutor who “acted in full compliance with his supervisors’ directives.”
James Breslo, hired in January, is part of the team suing the University of California, Los Angeles medical school for discriminating against white applicants. He is a former gambling executive and business lawyer who has hosted a podcast called “Hidden Truth.” Episodes included “AA Kills,” a takedown of Alcoholics Anonymous, and a deep dive into the origin of U.F.O.s. In 2018, he hosted the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who promoted her unsubstantiated claim that the man who killed 58 people on the Las Vegas Strip in 2017 was working for either Islamic terrorists or the government.
Mr. Breslo, in an essay posted weeks before the 2024 election, suggested President Barack Obama had “no love or reverence for the U.S. Constitution.” He claimed that Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, embraced “a political system antithetical” to the country’s founding principles, something he said was “not surprising given her upbringing” by parents who were not U.S. citizens at the time she was born.
Mr. Breslo “brings decades of legal and executive experience” to his job, Ms. Pels said.
Daniel Flickinger, who began working on the division’s education cases earlier this year, was forced out of his job at a Birmingham, Ala., law firm in 2020 after suggesting — to the disgust of his bosses — that Mr. Floyd was fortunate to have died in a “fentanyl- and methamphetamine-numbed strangulation” because “it meant being worshiped in a nationwide funeral.”
Mr. Flickinger maintained that his statement, posted to his private Facebook page, was never intended to be publicly disseminated. He later sued another lawyer for disseminating what he claimed to be defamatory comments about the post. Since then, he has worked in private practice, specializing in areas of law overseen by the division, Ms. Pels said.
Peter Feaman, a veteran lawyer from Florida hired in early 2025 as a senior counsel, has a history of far-right political statements. In a May 2021 post on social media, he accused the “diabolical” Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, of forcing citizens into getting the “mark of the beast” (a coronavirus shot).
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Peter Feaman, who has a history of far-right political statement like suggesting the Jan. 6 attack was a false-flag operation orchestrated by liberals, in 2020. He is now a senior counsel at the civil rights division.Credit...Tori Lynn Schneider/Tallahassee Democrat, via USA Today Network — Reuters
Mr. Feaman also suggested that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a false-flag operation orchestrated by liberals he likened to the Nazis. Trump voters, unlike the German citizens who kept silent in the 1930s, “have guns,” he wrote in a post.
One of his books, “Wake Up, America!,” includes a rave review on the dust jacket from The Times that never existed, according to a CNN report in 2021, written when Mr. Feaman was a member of the Republican National Committee.
Ms. Pels said Mr. Feaman’s work should be considered separately from his social media profile. “His years-old personal social media posts have nothing to do with his legal work, and resurfacing them is not a serious assessment of his qualifications,” she added.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: At Justice Dept., Dubious Recruits Fill In The Ranks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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AN 10 26
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department plan to use a “a historic number” of election-monitoring initiatives is facing a challenge in court from civil rights lawyers.
The NAACP has taken legal action against Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, asking for information concerning the department's plans to deploy more than 1,000 election monitors for the November 3 election.
The lawsuit, which has been brought in the federal court in Washington, is asking a judge to compel the department to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request that was submitted on September 1. The NAACP claims that the Department of Justice failed to meet the statutory deadline for deciding on the request and is therefore seeking emergency intervention before Election Day.
According to the complaint, the planned deployment “stands to jeopardize the election” and could interfere with voters’ ability to cast ballots “free from intimidation.”
The request for records asks for information regarding the legal basis of the operation, the locations where the monitors will be deployed, how they will be selected and trained, whether state officials gave their consent, and whether personnel from federal law enforcement agencies could take part.
The extent of the operation has attracted attention since Dhillon has stated that the department aims to send around 1,000 monitors to the polling stations. Todd Blanche, the Attorney General, said on Sunday that monitors would be going to all 50 states.
Blanche described the operation as being in line with the Justice Department's long-standing role in elections. For a long time, the department has sent federal officials to oversee compliance with voting-rights laws, but the NAACP contends that this year's initiative has moved away from that traditional function and is now focused on examining allegations regarding ballot security.
The Justice Department stated to The Guardian that its observers “comply with all legal and ethical requirements” and would not intervene in the voting process.
Concerns over the way the monitors would operate grew following an incident at Wyoming's primary. The Republican governor, Mark Gordon, stated that two federal monitors came to a polling place without being informed and tried to look at the voting machines. He called their actions "aggressive, unexpected, and disruptive".
The department denied that description and stated that the monitors had not done anything improper.
Kristen Clarke, who is the general counsel of the NAACP and previously headed the Civil Rights Division under President Joe Biden, stated that the organization would like the government to make public the authority it considers to be the basis for the operation and the way in which it plans to carry it out.
Now that Election Day is less than a month away, the conflict is causing part of Trump's election campaign to be brought before a federal judge and may compel the Justice Department to make public the details, which the NAACP says is the largest election-monitoring operation in the history of the United States.
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- Glenn Thrush and Michael C. Bender @ The New York Time:{s: From Top Civil Rights Post, She Spars With the Left, and Her Colleagues}:
Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, has extracted flashy agreements and personnel moves from big universities and sought to force states to turn over confidential voter data.
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AN 8 26 VID
President Donald Trump's loyalist and election denier, Tina Peters, is on a roadshow. Peters managed to score a commutation from a Democratic governor after her conviction for state crimes around the 2020 election. She was slated to be in jail for nine years. She only served 20 months.
The new election conspiracy roadshow drew the attention of CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who spoke with host Dana Bash on Friday. Bash questioned whether Peters has able to do much since she's "preaching to the converted." Cohen explained it's all about access.
Peters has met with the White House, the Commerce and the Justice Departments.
"The question of influence is something we're going to find out as we get closer and closer to the midterms and see if the president enacts some of these very extreme and aggressive ideas and proposals that Tina Peters is pitching," Cohen warned. "You just saw on your screen photos of her meetings this week in Washington, D.C.. She sat down with Harmeet Dhillon, who is the chief of the Justice Department's civil rights division."
Dhillon has been pushing her own election changes while at the DOJ.
Peters also met with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, which prompted questions on Lutnick's role in elections.
"The Commerce Department is home to the Census Bureau [which] put out a report claiming that there were tons of non-citizens voting in elections," Cohen explained. "It suggests that the office is also trying to play in this space, which is why it's notable that Tina Peters is meeting with him."
He said he spoke with Peters' lawyer Peter Ticktin, "who is also pushing for some very aggressive moves before the election."
According to his comments, Peters "has a plan."
"And I don't know whether, you know, she'll get the support to make sure her plan gets implemented. Her plan differs from mine greatly. It's still going to need an emergency order in order to have it happen," Ticktin said.
The idea of declaring a national emergency so the president can take over the 2026 midterm elections isn't a "hypothetical situation," said Stateline.
Nick Brown, Washington state’s Democratic attorney general, said that they're already preparing for Trump's attempts to nationalize the election.
Last week, when asked about nationalizing the election, Trump told a conservative commentator, "Stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that.”
Trump has yet to hit the "nuclear option," said Cohen. He also noted all of this is coming, again, because Democratic Gov. Jared Polis (Co.) commuted Peters' sentence, releasing her early.
"He said, it's the right thing to do, but he's disappointed in what she's up to in Washington," said the reporter.
The other thing that is making officials "lose their mind," Cohen said, is that Peters could be appointed to a post to consult on election security for the state of California. The post was offered by the Shasta County election official, who is a 2020 election denier.
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BREAKING: Trump DOJ Announces 1,000 Monitors to Watch You Vote
1K POLL WATCHERS HARMEET
Aug 17, 2026
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon just announced the Justice Department will deploy 1,000 election observers for the midterms. The DOJ wants you to think this is business as usual, but Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias breaks down why this deployment is anything but and how it's laying the groundwork for what comes after Election Day. Meanwhile, it's no surprise the announcement comes the same day the DOJ lost its 23rd straight court case over access to sensitive voter data. Plus, where are these 1,000 monitors actually coming from? Subscribe to our free newsletters or upgrade to support our work: https://demdock.com/4fBUQam00:00 DOJ Announces Plan For 1,000 Election Monitors 01:09 Harmeet Dillon Announces Election Observers 02:34 Playing Dillon's Full Announcement Clip 03:44 Dillon Normalizes an Unprecedented Power Grab 05:02 DOJ Run By Election Deniers, Not Independent 07:02 Where Will These Thousand Monitors Come From 09:43 History Proves The Alarm Was Justified 11:19 DOJ Loses 23 Straight Voter Data Cases 15:39 What Observers Can And Cannot Legally Do 17:49 How You Can Help Protect The Vote Democracy Docket is the leading digital news platform covering voting rights and elections in the courts — from an unapologetically pro-democracy and independent standpoint.
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AN 7 26
A letter from Harmeet Dhillon, who heads President Donald Trump’s DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, is demanding that Georgia officials explain within five days how they are preventing illegal voting in the state — despite the fact that illegal voting is not a legitimate problem in U.S. elections.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports the U.S. Department of Justice has also warned officials in the increasingly swingy Peach State that they could face criminal prosecution if noncitizens cast ballots, something that is already illegal.
Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who has a bumpy relationship with Trump, pointed out that his office has already cracked down on cases of noncitizen voting, which studies show is exceedingly rare, reports AJC. Raffensperger’s spokesperson, Robert Sinners, said the SOS conducted the first statewide citizenship audit of Georgia’s voter rolls, improved a federal election database and even pressed Congress to enshrine citizen-only voting in the Constitution.
The AJC reports Trump’s threat arrived the same day a federal judge in Atlanta “sharply questioned the Justice Department’s attempt to revive Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in Georgia’s 2020 election.”
Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Billy Ray II threw out a sweeping subpoena seeking information on thousands of Fulton County election workers and found that the five-year statute of limitations for crimes linked to the election had “long expired.” However, Trump’s DOJ issued the threat after a devastating Fox News poll revealed Democrats are destroying Republicans in most of the former red state’s most contentious races.
“In the Georgia governor’s race, Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms has a 5-point edge, with 52 percent support compared to 47 percent for Republican Rick Jackson,” reported AJC, citing the Fox poll. Additionally, Lance Bottoms' supporters are more certain of their vote than Jackson's by 80 percent vs. 75 percent
That same poll revealed Republicans in this swing state, which Trump lost to Biden years ago but reclaimed in 2023, also have a more favorable view of incumbent Democratic candidate John Ossoff, who Republicans will need to unseat in order to easily maintain their Senate majority.
Nearly 6 in 10 voters have a favorable opinion of Ossoff, which is much higher than the 4 in 10 for Republican Collins, or even Trump — who only gets 42 percent favorability — down 5 points in the 2024 Georgia Fox News Voter Analysis.
Worse, Georgians are six points more likely to say they are “extremely or very concerned” that Collins is too close to Trump than the Democratic incumbent is “too liberal.”
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OMFG
AN 7 26
On Tuesday, NBC News confirmed that the Justice Department has sent threatening letters to election officials spanning every state and Washington, D.C., asserting that they could “face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting.” According to NBC, the letters are the latest move in President Donald Trump’s effort to promote his false claims of widespread noncitizen voting and “assert more federal control over state elections.”
As NBC explains, “The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain ‘clean voter lists.’” And as NBC notes, noncitizen voting is so rare it’s almost nonexistent, “but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.”
The DOJ letters assert that state election officials “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” any noncitizen voting. They also emphasize that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a voting registration list or who helps noncitizens receive and cast ballots in any way could be subject to criminal liability, and that “an intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation.”
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
According to Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican election official who received one of the letters, the threats amounted to “truly bizarre behavior.”
Posting on social media, she revealed, “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”
Per NBC, “While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.”
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an 5 26
Over the past year, election-denying allies of President Donald Trump from both inside the government and out have sought voting data from across the country in an effort to “investigate” their assertions of electoral fraud. Now, according to new reporting from Talking Points Memo, “election conspiracy theorists” are attempting to lay the groundwork for a Department of Justice probe into Michigan.
In April, Michigan officials were left in “bewilderment” when DOJ Civil Division chief Harmeet Dhillon demanded public records pertaining to the 2024 election from the Wayne County clerk, asserting that it was part of an investigation into voter fraud. Officials weren’t bewildered because they were surprised at the request — quite the opposite, as the FBI has been scooping up voting data from districts across the country that voted against Trump, from Arizona to Georgia — but because Dhillon had sent it to the wrong office entirely, addressing it to the county clerk, when in Michigan, townships run elections.
According to local officials, her request not only suggests that Trump’s DOJ doesn’t understand the basic facts of electoral processes, but it raises pressing questions about what the president’s allies intend to do with the voting data. Election denying activists in Michigan are not shy about answering that question, asserting that they’re conducting what they call an “audit” of electoral results in an effort to fight a “cabal” of their enemies.
As Talking Points Memo explains, these investigations are “being carried out with the help of various election conspiracy theorists who are now in positions of power in the government. Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier, has been working as White House election security czar. Heather Honey, another activist, has an election security role at DOJ. Clay Parikh, another special government employee involved in the Fulton County raid.” While these figures provide federal support, election denying activists on the ground are doing much of the legwork.
According to Talking Points, “voter fraud alarmists” are “using documents obtained last year from a massive FOIA lawsuit that sought copies of Detroit’s 2020 ballots and other records. Yehuda Miller, a New Jersey-based activist who has been involved in election denialism for the last several years, obtained hundreds of thousands of ballot images from the City of Detroit. The question now on the minds of some Michigan elections officials is whether Miller’s ‘audit’ — regardless of how baseless and misleading the results may be — will prompt federal action. And, whether the conclusions that Miller has drawn may have already made their way to the Trump DOJ.”
Chris Thomas, who ran elections for the state of Michigan for nearly 40 years and faced a “mob” trying to stop the count in 2020, says that “those seeking the records have been in communication with a voter fraud alarmism nonprofit called Michigan Fair Elections and with the far-right, conspiracy theorist website Gateway Pundit, and say that they’ve enlisted dozens of volunteers to comb through the ballots.” He says it’s possible that the DOJ already has the FOIA data, and that the “‘audit’ could yield results that, while bogus to anyone familiar with election law, prompt some form of action” from the agency. He has his doubts, however, that the amateur investigation would prove useful in any potential criminal proceedings, saying, “I don’t think that stuff would stand up at all.”
While Talking Points notes that it’s unclear whether Miller is working directly with the DOJ, his activist allies have said they would share their findings with the agency.
“I sure as heck am going to be sharing it with everybody that I know, and I’ve got a lot of contacts up in the DOJ,” said Patrick Colbeck, an election conspiracy theorist and former GOP Michigan state senator. “Everything they share, I will make sure it gets to them,” he asserted, referring to the DOJ.
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GO AFTER ca DISTRICTS POST CALAIS
AI Overview GGL 5 26
Following the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais (April/May 2026), which curbed the use of race in redistricting, U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) has spearheaded a Republican effort to challenge Democratic-led congressional maps. [1, 2]
Schmitt's Actions Following Callais
- DOJ Pressure: Schmitt sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) urging them to act on the ruling, which he argues makes it illegal to use the Voting Rights Act (VRA) to justify racially gerrymandered districts. [1, 2]
- Targeting Blue States: Schmitt has specifically called on the DOJ to target California, arguing their maps were driven by partisan, not racial, considerations. He described the ruling as a "map war" that allows for challenging maps in blue states. [1, 2]
- Subcommittee Role: Acting as Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Schmitt is pushing for a nationwide review of districts. [1]
GOP Strategy & "Map War"
- Shifting Legal Landscape: Republicans, including Schmitt, argue that the Callais decision means states can no longer use the VRA as an excuse for racial gerrymandering. [1]
- "Ending Racial Gerrymandering": Schmitt states that the decision restores the promise of equal representation and prevents "carving up America into racial spoils". [1]
- Reactions: While proponents suggest this ensures fair maps, critics argue it allows for more traditional partisan gerrymandering and could eliminate majority-minority districts that ensure representation. [1, 2]
- Harmeet Dhillon Response: Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon responded to Schmitt, stating the DOJ is "on it" regarding the review of potentially illegal districts. [1, 2]
Callais is expected to cause significant changes to the 2026 midterm election landscape, with the potential for legal battles over district lines in several states. [1, 2]
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mma
05/04/26
After VRA ruling, Benny Johnson suggests the Trump administration “should go full speed ahead in bringing the full force of the federal government against these DEI districts”
Written by Media Matters Staff
Published 05/04/26
Video
Citation
From the May 4, 2026, edition of The Benny Show, posted to YouTube
BENNY JOHNSON (HOST): Harmeet Dhillon, who, of course, is a favorite of our show ... she said that she is going to be suing in order to ensure that there are reparations for hard-working Americans who have been disenfranchised through Eric Holder and Barack Obama's racism in creating congressional ghettos and DEI districts. Your take on that, how should Harmeet Dhillon ensure that maps are as fair and equitable as possible for the 2026 elections?
MIKE DAVIS (GUEST): I love Harmeet Dhillon, and I always say this: my favorite Americans are women and minority conservatives because they are absolutely the most bold and fearless people on the planet. They're great -- whether it's Byron Donalds or Harmeet Dhillon -- these are the types of people who I want in these offices. People who are going to fight every day for America, for the West, for our way of life, for our Judeo-Christian traditions. Harmeet is phenomenal.
...
The best thing about Harmeet, the best thing about this new version of the Trump administration, is prior Republicans, George W. Bush Republicans — and I worked in the George W. Bush White House — we were, those Republicans who were so scared of being labeled as racists or sexist or homophobe or transphobe or whatever phobe the Democrats come out with. And my response to those Republicans is to say to those Democrats, ‘Go to hell. You're not going to be able to use your Marxist division and cow us like you've done in the past.' We are the party of opportunity for poor Black people trapped in these Democrat ghettos and these DEI districts. Democrats want to keep minorities trapped in intergenerational poverty. They want victims. They want misery. Because that's the Marxist playbook. So, people like Harmeet Dhillon, people like Byron Donalds, they are the all-stars.
JOHNSON: So, Harmeet should go full speed ahead in bringing the full force of the federal government against these DEI districts and lawfare Democrats who want to sue in order to create these congressional ghettos?
DAVIS: Absolutely. The Supreme Court just ruled that we, you can have political gerrymandering, but you cannot have racial gerrymandering. It was a brilliant opinion by Justice Sam Alito, and Harmeet can go after every one of these districts, these House districts where these Democrats in these blue states intentionally sliced and diced the population to have a DEI district, to have some loser Democrat minority be the House representative and go grift and make millions of dollars and do nothing for their poor Black or poor Hispanic constituents.
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RWW 04/09/2026
Jason Salzman at Colorado Times Recorder: How a Stealth Conservative News Service, Called Center Square, Infects Local Media Across America
Center Square has figured out how to have an under-the-radar right-wing “political agenda” and present readers with the basic elements of journalism, which helps it score higher ratings from watchdogs.
Yunior Rivas @ Democracy Docket: Former Proud Boys leader urges MAGA to give Harmeet Dhillon ‘a fair shot’ if promoted at DOJ
Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in coordinating the effort to block certification of the 2020 election. He later received a pardon from President Donald Trump.
Robert Reich @ Substack: The truth about Harmeet Dhillon, Trump's likely pick for attorney general
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.
Justin Jouevenal @ Washington Post: Supreme Court remade by Trump ushers in historic defeats for civil rights
The court is the first since at least the ’50s to reject claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities
Meghna Chakrabarti @ NPR’s On Point: What happens when religious fundamentalists come to power?
How Christian extremism came to influence the Trump administration and offer moral underpinnings for the new war in the Middle East, with guests Katherine Stewart and Robert Jones
Aaron Earles @ Christianity Today: Pastors Want More Ways for Immigrants to Arrive and Remain Legally
While pastors are divided on the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, a large majority oppose deporting persecuted Christians and blocking refugees.
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DOUBLING DOWN?!
AN 2 26
On Thursday, February 26, the Trump-era U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) case against journalist and former CNN host Don Lemon took on a Philadelphia element when Jerome Richardson — a Minnesota native now attending Philly's Temple University — was recognized by members of the Philadelphia City Council. Richardson is facing charges as part of the same DOJ case against Lemon, who was arrested after covering a protest inside an evangelical fundamentalist church in Minneapolis. And the case continued to evolve and expand on Friday, February 27, when Politico's Josh Gerstein reported on new defendants.
Late Friday morning, Gerstein — in a post on X — reported, "DEVELOPING: Superseding indictment returned in Don Lemon Minnesota church protest case. Local press says more defendants added and arrested. Awaiting more details."
According to Samantha Fischer, a reporter for KARE Channel 11 in Minneapolis, "KARE 11 confirmed at least nine more people were arrested in connection with a St. Paul church protest last month that already saw the high-profile arrests of journalists Georgia Fort and Don Lemon, as well as attorney and activist Nekima Levy Armstrong. KARE's Lou Raguse said sources reported those arrested were taken to the federal courthouse in St. Paul, where they're expected to make their first court appearances Friday afternoon."
Gerstein tweeted a copy of a federal court document in *United States of America v. Nekima Valdez Levyarmstrong, Et Al.
In the document, Harmeet K. Dhillon — assistant U.S. attorney general in DOJ's Civil Rights Division — and other federal prosecutors write, "The United States of America, by and through its undersigned attorneys, hereby moves the Court for an order to unseal the Superseding Indictment in the above-referenced matter."
Lemon and his allies maintain that the Trump DOJ case him has no merit, as he wasn't part of the demonstration inside the Minneapolis church and was strictly there as a journalist.
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an 1 26
On Monday, January 26, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz — a federal judge in Minnesota — chastised the Trump Administration for its handling of immigration cases and ordered Todd Lyons, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to appear before him this Friday, January 30. And Schiltz is considering holding Lyons in contempt of court.
Right-wing media figures and supporters of President Donald Trump were quick to attack Schiltz, noting that he is a donor to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota and accusing him of a conflict of interest. But others are countering that the rules allow the judge to make such a donation. And now, Homeland Security official Harmeet K. Dhillon is having a heated debate with Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center over the matter.
Fox News' Bill Melugin, in a January 27 post on X, formerly Twitter, wrote, "@FoxNews has learned that Patrick J. Schiltz, the Minnesota federal judge who is threatening to hold ICE Director Todd Lyons in contempt of court & is ordering him to appear in court on Friday, appears in a 2019 list of donors & volunteers for the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, an organization that provides free legal advice and representation for illegal immigrants. Judge Schiltz was appointed by President Bush in 2006."
But Schiltz, in a statement to Fox News, said, "I have donated for many years to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. I have also donated for many years to Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid. I believe that poor people should be able to get legal representation."
In response to Melugin's posts, Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center tweeted, "'A judge may contribute financially to legal service associations that provide counsel for the poor. A judge need not recuse merely because lawyers who accept appointments by such associations are also counsel of record in cases before that judge.' A federal appellate judge informs me that's the official advice to federal judges (set forth in a nonpublic Compendium of Selected Opinions, § 4.2-3(g))."
But Whelan is getting an angry reaction from Department of Homeland Security official Harmeet Dhillon, who is accusing Whelan of twisting the facts.
DHS official Harmeet K. Dhillon tweeted, "So you don't have clients and therefore zero concept of what it means to appear before judges who should have recused due to the appearance of impropriety. This is why you feel comfortable parroting this context free."
Whelan, in response, accused Dhillon of engaging in a "non sequitur" and noted he's "spent the last two decades promoting originalism and textualism."
Defense attorney Andrew Fleischman humorously tweeted a summary of the exchange:
*"DOJ: This judge has to recuse himself because he's donated to a legal service association that provides counsel for the poor
Whelan: The rules specifically allow this
DOJ: DO YOU EVEN LAWYER BRO."*
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AN 1 26
The fatal shooting of 37-year-old motorist Renee Nicole Good by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, January 7 is drawing scathing condemnation on both the left and the right. Some prominent conservatives and libertarians — including The Bulwark's Bill Kristol, MS NOW's Joe Scarborough, former Judge Andrew Napolitano (a legal analyst for Newsmax), The New York Times' David French and The Lincoln Project's
— are joining liberals and progressives in condemning the shooting as excessive force.
Yet allies of President Donald Trump, from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to Vice President JD Vance, are vigorously defending the ICE agent and claiming that he acted in self-defense. Noem, without evidence, even attacked Good as a "domestic terrorist." And according to reporting from the Washington Post, several U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) officials were so appalled by Trump allies' response to Good's death that they resigned from the agency.
In an article published late Monday night, January 12, Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian explain, "At least four leaders of a Justice Department unit that investigates police killings have resigned in protest over the (Trump) Administration's handling of the fatal shooting of a motorist in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, according to three people briefed on the departures. Top leaders of the criminal section of the Civil Rights Division have left their jobs to register their frustration with the department after the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon decided not to investigate the ICE officer's fatal shooting of Renee Good last week."
Leonnig and Dilanian note that ordinarily, the criminal section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division would investigate a fatal shooting by a federal law enforcement officer.
Kristen Clarke, who led the Civil Rights Division under former President Joe Biden, told the Post, "Investigating officials to determine if they broke the law, defied policy, failed to deescalate, and resorted to deadly force without basis is one of the Civil Rights Division’s most solemn duties. Prosecutors of the Civil Rights Division have, for decades, been the nation's leading experts in this work."
These resignations, according to Leonnig and Dilanian "represent the most significant mass resignation" at DOJ since February 2025.
"Good's shooting on January 7 has galvanized Democrats and civil libertarians but also frustrated Minnesota politicians and state police investigators," the Post reporters observe. "On January 10, the FBI announced it would be handling the investigation of Good's shooting on its own and blocked Minnesota authorities from their typical role in reviewing evidence and investigating the shooting themselves."
*Read Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian's full article for the Washington Post at this link (subscription required).
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AN 12 25
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is lashing out at the followers of President Donald Trump, calling them the "r-word" and demanding they keep quiet about her cases.
National security analyst Marcy Wheeler noticed the unusual rant against conservatives from a top DOJ official who oversees the agency protecting the civil rights of disabled Americans, among others.
Dhillon took to X on Sunday night to respond to MAGA followers she said are spreading lies because they are either dumb or part of the attacks on conservatives like her.
It began with MAGA influencer and commentator David Freeman (a.k.a. Gunther Eagleman), who begged Attorney General Pam Bondi not to allow the statute of limitations expire without going after the officials on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks. Dhillon responded, telling him he has no idea what he's talking about.
"Trump/Bondi DOJ is working to bring to justice those who weaponized January 6th, 2021. No statute of limitations will hinder DOJ's efforts to bring justice to those who weaponized persecution of American citizens," claimed Dhillon. "January 6th 2026 is NOT a deadline for DOJ to bring prosecutions."
"My boss @AGPamBondi works around the clock to bring justice for all Americans! Don’t be a hater and a simp for weaponized online disinformation!!" Dhillon added.
"This [hat] is an hour behind schedule thanks to influencer r——," she then said with a photo of a partially-knitted cap.
"My goodness… are you people really gonna make me put down my knitting and explain Statutes of Limitation to you?! FFS," she added.
"'Conservative' influencers, if you think you are 'keeping the pressure on' or 'winning' by spreading bulls—— attacks on @realDonaldTrump's hand-picked [C]abinet, you are NOT ... Learn an honest profession."
Wheeler asked some of the GOP members of the U.S. Senate, "do you think it is appropriate — legal, even — for the AAG in charge protecting the Civil Rights of disabled Americans to try to silence right wing speech by using the r-word? Are there ANY adults left in the GOP? Or even civil human beings?"
She also asked Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) "I know you take protecting far right wing speech from government attack very seriously, so I'm wondering when you will impeach Harmeet for jawboning conservative influencers for their 1A speech?"
Tami Marler, a former Miss Oklahoma, who is now a journalist, suggested on X, "The Trump administration could use a communications 101 course. The one where you're taught to not alienate the base you DESPERATELY NEED to keep from getting decimated in the midterms and to keep Trump from being impeached AND removed. Keep calling ardent but disillusioned supporters idiots and other childish names. See where that gets you in November."
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AN 12 25
About 200 former attorneys and staff from the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice are warning of the “near destruction of DOJ’s once-revered crown jewel,” and what they call Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “demand” for “loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.”
“For decades, the non-partisan work of the Civil Rights Division at the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has protected all Americans—especially the most vulnerable—from unfair treatment and unequal opportunities,” they write in a letter dated Tuesday. They added that “after witnessing this Administration destroy much of our work, we made the heartbreaking decision to leave—along with hundreds of colleagues, including about 75 percent of attorneys.”
Bloomberg Law reported on Tuesday that the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division will now focus only on “intentional discrimination,” and not “policies that may appear neutral but disproportionately affect racial minorities and other protected classes.”
In their letter, the former attorneys and staff specifically state that they left the Civil Rights Division “because this Administration turned the Division’s core mission upside down, largely abandoning its duty to protect civil rights,” and that it “achieved this goal by discarding much of the Division’s most impactful work.”
The group blasted Attorney General Bondi, who, they said, “issued a series of memos that subverted the Division’s mission in favor of President Trump’s political agenda.”
“One stood out: it insinuated that DOJ attorneys were Trump’s personal lawyers, an assertion that struck at the heart of the agency’s independence. Bondi’s demand to us was obvious: loyalty to the President, not the Constitution or the American people.”
In another scathing section, they charged that Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon “focused her efforts on ‘driving [the Civil Rights Division] in the opposite direction’ of its longstanding purpose.”
They allege she issued mission statements “that included fighting diversity initiatives instead of race-based discrimination, investigating baseless allegations of voter fraud rather than protecting the right to vote, and dropping any mention of the Fair Housing Act, a landmark 1968 law that protects Americans from landlords’ racial discrimination and sexual harassment.”
And they charge that the administration “demanded that we find facts to fit the Administration’s predetermined outcomes.”
“Having no use for the expertise of career staff, the Administration launched a coordinated effort to drive us out,” they wrote. “The campaign to purge staff culminated in Dhillon encouraging everyone to resign after a period of paid leave while threatening layoffs if enough staff did not accept.”
Christine Stoneman, one of the letter’s signatories, told Bloomberg Law, “It is a sad commentary that in this anniversary of the Civil Rights Division, the Trump administration has chosen to eliminate a regulation that, for nearly 60 years has helped root out illegal race and national origin discrimination by recipients of federal funds.”
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an 11 25
This week, Californians voted overwhelmingly for Prop 50, which replaces the Golden State's current U.S. House of Representatives district map with a new one designed to give Democrats an edge in five Republican districts. The California Republican Party (CAGOP) is now suing to stop the new maps from taking effect, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is doubting that the suit will succeed.
According to Politico, the CAGOP sued in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, claiming the new maps Prop 50 puts in place violate the 14th and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution on the basis of race, "without cause or basis to justify it." The 14th Amendment contains the Equal Protection Clause, which requires states to provide fair legal treatment to all citizens. The 15th Amendment prohibits states from denying citizens the right to vote (which was ratified after the Civil War).
"While the Constitution entrusts States with designing congressional districts, the Supreme Court has also held that states may not, without a compelling reason backed by evidence that was in fact considered, separate citizens into different voting districts on the basis of race," the complaint read.
After Prop 50 passed, Steve Bannon — who was President Donald Trump's chief White House strategist during his first term — urged the Trump administration to have Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon (who oversees the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division) sue California and win a temporary restraining order, and preventing Prop 50's new maps from going into effect through litigation. However, California Democratic Party leaders remain confident that Prop 50 will survive any court challenges.
On Wednesday, KCRA News political director Ashley Zavala reported that Gov. Newsom's office issued a statement in response to the CAGOP's lawsuit — and included a taunt against both Republicans and Dhillon.
"We haven’t reviewed the lawsuit, but if it’s from the California Republican Party and Harmeet Dhillon’s law firm, it’s going to fail," stated Newsom spokesperson Brandon Richards. "Good luck, losers."
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AN 10 25
The home of one state judge in South Carolina who was publicly criticized by an official in President Donald Trump's administration was destroyed in a fire last weekend. The judge had recently been targeted by threats from Trump supporters.
Judge Diane Goodstein, who has been in her position since being elected by the state legislature in 1998, escaped from the fire along with her husband, former Democratic state lawmaker Arnold Goodstein, though Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wrote that the fire killed their pets and Arnold Goodstein remains hospitalized from injuries suffered during his escape. The St. Paul Fire District — which responded to the fire at her Edisto Beach home on Saturday – posted to Facebook that the Goodsteins escaped by jumping from an elevated first floor.
"If this was targeted political violence or arson, those responsible must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Mace wrote.
According to a Monday report in the Daily Beast, several MAGA-aligned social media accounts with thousands of followers posted attacks on South Carolina Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein. Those threats came in response to a post by Department of Justice (DOJ) official Harmeet Dhillon, who President Donald Trump put in charge of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division. Dhillon attacked Judge Goodstein for refusing to allow the Trump administration to access sensitive information from the state's voter rolls.
"his @TheJusticeDept’s @CivilRights will not stand for a state court judge’s hasty nullification of our federal voting laws," Dhillon wrote on X in September. "I will allow nothing to stand in the way of our mandate to maintain clean voter rolls. One Citizen, One Vote!"
"Thank you. I’m so sick of these activist 'judges' thinking they run the country," responded one X user with more than 6,000 followers. "Isn’t there something that can be done about them?"
"Rain Holy hell fire onto these judges who interfere with the Executive branch," another user wrote in a now-deleted post.
"Diane S. Goodstein, may all your evil wishes and evil deeds directed towards Trump and the MAGA boomerang back and stick to you and yours a thousandfold," read another reply.
An arson investigation is reportedly underway, though officials have not yet determined whether the fire was intentionally ignited.
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AN 1025
In the wake of widespread outrage following a violent fire at a South Carolina judge's house that sent three people to the hospital, critics blamed MAGA, causing White House Deputy Chief of StaffStephen Miller to melt down, according to The Daily Beast.
South Carolina Judge Diane Goodstein, who ruled against the Trump administration in a high-profile voter registration case, was out walking her dogs Sunday when her beach house exploded in flames.
Judge Goodstein issued a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration’s Department of Justice from getting access to the South Carolina Election Commission’s voter registration data, The Daily Best says.
Reports say Goodstein was already receiving death threats before the fire, which is being investigated as arson. Her husband Arnold, a former Democratic state congressman and state senator, , was forced to jump from the first floor to escape the blaze and was hospitalized with multiple broken bones.
Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) posted on his X account pointing his finger at Miller, saying, "Stephen Miller and MAGA-world have been doxxing and threatening judges who rule against Trump, including Judge Goodstein. Today, someone committed arson on the Judge’s home, severely injuring her husband and son. Will Trump speak out against the extreme right that did this??”
MIller immediately melted down on X, calling Goldman "deeply warped and vile," saying, “There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country. It is well organized and funded. And it is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks."
Miller continued his rant, saying, “While the Trump Administration has launched the first-ever government-wide effort to combat and prosecute illegal doxing, sinister threats and political violence you continue to push despicable lies, demented smears, malicious defamation and foment unrest. Despicable."
But Goldman had the last word.
"If you are trying to combat political violence, why don’t you condemn the political violence against a judge who ruled against you and your admin? It’s pretty simple: do you condemn all political violence or only that against your supporters?”
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9 25 KIRK SHOOT BONDI SAYS HD WILL GO AFTER OFFICE DEPOT REFUSE TO PRINT FLYER
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9 25
AG Pam Bondi Says "We Can Prosecute You" for Refusing to Print Posters for Charlie Kirk Vigil
But there doesn't seem to be any federal law actually authorizing such prosecutions (or civil lawsuits).
Eugene Volokh | 9.16.2025
The Hill (Ashleigh Fields) reports:
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday said the Justice Department was investigating an incident involving a Michigan Office Depot employee who refused to print flyers advertising a vigil for conservative activist Charlie Kirk…. Office Depot said last week they removed the employee responsible for denying the order placed by the Kalamazoo County Republican Party.
Here's the Bondi quote, from Hannity on Fox, starting about 4:42:
Businesses cannot discriminate. If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie's pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that. But I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our Civil Rights unit looking at that immediately, that Office Depot had done that. We're looking at that.
But no federal law, to my knowledge, purports to ban stores from discriminating based on the political expression of the material they're asked to print.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination by certain places of public accommodation—such as restaurants, hotels, theaters, and places of public amusement—based on race, religion, and national origin. But it doesn't ban discrimination based on political views, and it doesn't apply to retailers, so it wouldn't apply here. It also bans discrimination based on disability, but that's not applicable here either. Businesses candiscriminate, just not on bases that the law forbids; and here, federal law doesn't appear to forbid this sort of discrimination.
Now some jurisdictions do ban political discrimination in places of public accommodation (see this article). If such a ban were applied to a print shop that deliberately refused to process an order based on its political content, then it might violate the First Amendment (see the concurrence in *Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Comm'n v. Hands On Originals* (Ky. 2019), a case in which Cato Institute and I filed an amicus brief making the First Amendment argument).
That First Amendment claim would be strengthened, of course, by 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), which recognized a First Amendment right not to create a website for same-sex weddings. It's conceivable that a court might limit the First Amendment defenses to small businesses where the owner would have to do the work personally; cf. Rumsfeld v. FAIR(2006), which upheld certain requirements that universities host certain speech, and distribute related speech, though perhaps the reasoning of 303 Creativewould apply even to a large business such as Office Depot.
But none of that even arises here, because those jurisdictions are certain cities and counties, some territories, D.C., and perhaps a few states. None of those laws applies to the Office Depot involved in this incident; and even if there was such a law in Michigan or in the town of Portage (where the store was apparently located), it wouldn't be enforced by the U.S. Justice Department. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it's hard to see a credible legal basis for AG Bondi's statements.
Start your day with Reason
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The Hill
Bondi threatens charges over Office Depot employee who wouldn’t print Charlie Kirk flyers
Attorney General Pam Bondi investigates Office Depot employee's refusal to print flyers for conservative activist Charlie Kirk's vigil.
.1 day ago
The Independent
Bondi to prosecute Office Depot worker who refused to print Charlie Kirk flyers
Office Depot fired a Michigan employee who refused to print flyers for a Charlie Kirk vigil, claiming they were 'propaganda'
.23 hours ago
Mediaite
Pam Bondi Threatens Charges Over Office Depot Employee Who Refused To Print Charlie Kirk Flyers: ‘We ...
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice is considering bringing charges after a now-fired Office Depot employee refused to...
.1 day ago
Sportskeeda
"Get rid of her": Matt Walsh slams Pam Bondi after she threatens to prosecute Office Depot employee for refusing to print Charlie Kirk flyers
Conservative commentator and podcaster Matt Walsh slammed Attorney General Pam Bondi after she allegedly threaten
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GGL 9 25
NPR
The Justice Department sues Maine and Oregon, ratcheting up demands for voter data
The Department of Justice is escalating its demands for sensitive data from voting officials, suing two Democratic-controlled states who...
.2 hours ago
Department of Justice (.gov)
Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet K. Dhillon
Harmeet K. Dhillon ... Harmeet K. Dhillon is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. She was nominated...
.Jun 17, 2025
Democracy Docket
DOJ Sues Maine, Oregon in Aggressive Move to Seize State Voter Data
The DOJ filed lawsuits against Maine and Oregon, escalating its campaign to obtain sensitive voter registration data from states across the...
.19 hours ago
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an 9 25
The Guardian reports the Friday National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. hosted a wide variety of far-right religious extremists, from men-only secret societies to theocratic right-wing pundits and associations.
Other event speakers were closely associated with the secretive Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an invitation-only, Christian ultra-nationalist network with “undercurrents of neo-fascist accelerationism,” according to a Middlebury Institute report.
Mingling and mixing among the theocrats, however, were Trump officials.
READ MORE: 'Whiplash': Insider says Trump 'knows where things stand' — and it’s killing him
“NatCon is filled with extremists touting white nationalism and conspiracy theories,” said Heidi Beirich, the chief strategy officer and co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “What is notable is how Trump administration officials and allies are key players in the event, showing that it is near impossible today to distinguish the far right from the administration.”
One speech by White house “border czar” Tom Homan contained warnings for the city of Chicago, which Trump is threatening to douse with federal agents and national guard troops, as he already has in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
“I said two months ago, we’re going to flood the zone and that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Homan told the crowd. “In Chicago, it’s coming. So, watch what happens in the very near future.”
The Guardian reports Trump’s deputy attorney general, Harmeet Dhillon, gave her own speech in which she characterized the justice department’s civil rights division as “the president’s shock troops.”
READ MORE: Trump discovers rejection on the world stage — because of his 'weak mind': analysis
“We’re the front guard. We are going to go first and clear the way for others to do their work,” said Dhillon, who has assigned civil rights lawyers to investigate anti-genocide campus protests and perceived “anti-Christian bias.”
Other administration figures speaking at NatCon included Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and Small Business Administration leader and former senator, Kelly Loeffler.
These Trump officials shared screen time with leading figures of the so-called “new right,” an anti-democratic and ultra-nationalist far-right movement “whose reactionary views have undergirded the Trump administration’s actions,” according to the Guardian. They also shared space with Society for American Civic Renewal Co-founder Charles Haywood — a regular engagement farmer on X — who recently posted: “Has a single (subcontinent) Indian ever accomplished anything of truly major note in the modern period?”
The Guardian reports the conference also featured “prominent faces from the universe of thinktanks surrounding the Trump administration who have signed on to, or even devised the Project 2025 agenda that has provided a blueprint for Trump’s actions in its first months.” This included Heritage Foundation president, Kevin Roberts, whose speech “leaned into male grievance and anti-immigrant sentiment,” according to the Guardian.
READ MORE: 'Game over': Bill Maher sends shockwaves with new warning about Trump
Read the full Guardian report at this link.
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AN 7 25
The Trump regime’s battle with Harvard University will be aired in court today when a federal judge hears arguments in Harvard’s lawsuit challenging Trump’s attack on it.
At stake is not just $2.2 billion in grants for scientific research, but the larger question of whether Trump can impose his agenda on independent universities in America — forcing them to bring their admissions, disciplinary procedures, academic hiring, and curricula in line with his priorities.
With the Trump regime ramping up its attacks on colleges and universities across America — using the pretexts of “DEI,” antisemitism, and transgender athletes to undermine academic freedom — it would seem more important than ever for universities to join together to stop him.
There is strength in solidarity. If each college and university seeks only to protect itself, the dictator-in-chief can pick off one after another — as he’s trying to do with law firms, the media, judges, and every other institution of civil society.
Which brings me to Dartmouth College.
I graduated from Dartmouth in 1968. It gave me a wonderful education. I was also 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 that included such people as Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza, and Harmeet Dhillon.
Now, Dartmouth is headed by Sian Beilock, who has turned Dartmouth into a Trumpy academic outpost.
Beilock declined to join more than 600 other academic institutions —including all of Dartmouth’s Ivy League peers — in signing a letter in defense of Harvard, which proclaimed “one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
This March, as Trump escalated his threats against universities, Beilock hired the former top lawyer at the Republican National Committee, Matt Raymer, as the college’s general counsel. (Raymer is a Dartmouth alumnus who, as recently as January, argued in a conservative online publication called The Federalist that Trump was right about birthright citizenship.)
Around the time Beilock declined to sign the letter defending Harvard, Beilock met with Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s recently confirmed assistant attorney general for civil rights, who posted on X after their meeting: “I was so impressed to learn how Dartmouth (my alma mater) is getting it right, after all these years. Kudos to Dartmouth!”
In 1988, as editor of The Dartmouth Review, Dhillon became momentarily notorious for publishing a column depicting Dartmouth’s then president 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, on October 26, also depicted Freedman, who had been critical of The Review, as Hitler.
As I said, I was a trustee of Dartmouth at the time. I saw up close how much Dhillon’s publication hurt Freedman. The student newspaper The Dartmouthtook The Reviewto task: “The column is anti-Semitic; its impact rings through this community today and will remain long after its publishers have completed their stints in Hanover.”
Several faculty members wrote to outside advisers of The Review, asking them to reconsider allowing their names to be associated with the publication. The regional office of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in Boston, condemned the column.
Now, twenty-seven years later, as assistant attorney general for civil rights, Dhillon is investigating most of the Ivy League for antisemitism. Notably, she is not investigating Dartmouth.
Dartmouth has so far avoided the sort of threats Trump has leveled against Harvard, which are being litigated today. In fact, Dartmouth is the only Ivy aside from Yale to escape targeted attacks to its funding.
Presumably that’s because Beilock has appeased Trump, at least for now.
This week’s New Yorker contains a piece by Rob Wolfe titled “How Dartmouth Became the Ivy League’s Switzerland.” I don’t think the analogy holds. Dartmouth isn’t like Switzerland, which stayed neutral in World War II. It’s more like Neville Chamberlain’s Great Britain just before the war, which sought to appease the tyrant.
As the world painfully learned, tyrants can’t be appeased. Tyrants view appeasement as weakness, and always want more.
Were it not for FDR’s United States and Winston Churchill’s Britain, Hitler might have won, and both Dartmouth and Harvard might now be teaching Nazi versions of history, science, and everything else.
Which is why Sian Beilock gets this week’s Neville Chamberlain award.
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AN 7 25
The Trump regime’s battle with Harvard University will be aired in court today when a federal judge hears arguments in Harvard’s lawsuit challenging Trump’s attack on it.
At stake is not just $2.2 billion in grants for scientific research, but the larger question of whether Trump can impose his agenda on independent universities in America — forcing them to bring their admissions, disciplinary procedures, academic hiring, and curricula in line with his priorities.
With the Trump regime ramping up its attacks on colleges and universities across America — using the pretexts of “DEI,” antisemitism, and transgender athletes to undermine academic freedom — it would seem more important than ever for universities to join together to stop him.
There is strength in solidarity. If each college and university seeks only to protect itself, the dictator-in-chief can pick off one after another — as he’s trying to do with law firms, the media, judges, and every other institution of civil society.
Which brings me to Dartmouth College.
I graduated from Dartmouth in 1968. It gave me a wonderful education. I was also 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 that included such people as Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza, and Harmeet Dhillon.
Now, Dartmouth is headed by Sian Beilock, who has turned Dartmouth into a Trumpy academic outpost.
Beilock declined to join more than 600 other academic institutions —including all of Dartmouth’s Ivy League peers — in signing a letter in defense of Harvard, which proclaimed “one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.”
This March, as Trump escalated his threats against universities, Beilock hired the former top lawyer at the Republican National Committee, Matt Raymer, as the college’s general counsel. (Raymer is a Dartmouth alumnus who, as recently as January, argued in a conservative online publication called The Federalist that Trump was right about birthright citizenship.)
Around the time Beilock declined to sign the letter defending Harvard, Beilock met with Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s recently confirmed assistant attorney general for civil rights, who posted on X after their meeting: “I was so impressed to learn how Dartmouth (my alma mater) is getting it right, after all these years. Kudos to Dartmouth!”
In 1988, as editor of The Dartmouth Review, Dhillon became momentarily notorious for publishing a column depicting Dartmouth’s then president 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, on October 26, also depicted Freedman, who had been critical of The Review, as Hitler.
As I said, I was a trustee of Dartmouth at the time. I saw up close how much Dhillon’s publication hurt Freedman. The student newspaper The Dartmouthtook The Reviewto task: “The column is anti-Semitic; its impact rings through this community today and will remain long after its publishers have completed their stints in Hanover.”
Several faculty members wrote to outside advisers of The Review, asking them to reconsider allowing their names to be associated with the publication. The regional office of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, in Boston, condemned the column.
Now, twenty-seven years later, as assistant attorney general for civil rights, Dhillon is investigating most of the Ivy League for antisemitism. Notably, she is not investigating Dartmouth.
Dartmouth has so far avoided the sort of threats Trump has leveled against Harvard, which are being litigated today. In fact, Dartmouth is the only Ivy aside from Yale to escape targeted attacks to its funding.
Presumably that’s because Beilock has appeased Trump, at least for now.
This week’s New Yorker contains a piece by Rob Wolfe titled “How Dartmouth Became the Ivy League’s Switzerland.” I don’t think the analogy holds. Dartmouth isn’t like Switzerland, which stayed neutral in World War II. It’s more like Neville Chamberlain’s Great Britain just before the war, which sought to appease the tyrant.
As the world painfully learned, tyrants can’t be appeased. Tyrants view appeasement as weakness, and always want more.
Were it not for FDR’s United States and Winston Churchill’s Britain, Hitler might have won, and both Dartmouth and Harvard might now be teaching Nazi versions of history, science, and everything else.
Which is why Sian Beilock gets this week’s Neville Chamberlain award.
---
---
OMG
an 7 25
The Department of Justice’s (DoJ) civil rights chief is urging a federal judge to hand down just one day behind bars for the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) officer convicted in Breonna Taylor’s 2020 death, the New York Times reported Thursday.
This is a surprising shift from the unit’s typical stance on combatting racial inequities in law enforcement.
Taylor was a 26-year-old Black emergency medical technician from Louisville, Kentucky. In March 2020, LMPD officers executed a “no-knock” warrant at her apartment, linked to a drug investigation targeting someone else. During the raid, police fired multiple shots into her home.
READ MORE:'Sad Sunday': Christian power couple smacks down evangelical conservatives in rare public statement
In a Kentucky federal trial last year, Officer Brett Hankison was found guilty of violating Taylor’s civil rights. The jury determined he used excessive force by firing multiple shots through her window during a drug raid gone wrong.
On Wednesday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, urged Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings to impose “one day in prison” for Hankison — time he has essentially already served — and to sentence him to three years of supervised release.
Facing up to life in prison, Hankison’s fate hinges on a sentencing hearing scheduled for next week, during which the judge will weigh the government’s recommendation, per the report.
The DOJ's move generated backlash on social media.
READ MORE:'Didn’t you vote to pass this?' GOP rep stumps CNN host after blasting bill he voted for
Wisconsin state senator Chris Larson (D) wrote on the social platform X: "Just when you think this Administration can’t stoop any lower, they go and do something like this. I don’t ever want to hear anyone who supports this President talk about being 'tough on crime' ever again."
Author Devin Burghart wrote: "Trump's DOJ declares emphatically that Black lives don't matter. Justice Dept. Asks for 1-Day Sentence for Ex-Officer Convicted in Breonna Taylor Raid."
History professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries, the brother of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) wrote: "Cop facing up to life in prison for his conviction for actions connected to the murder of #BreonnaTaylor, and this racist a-- regime's #JusticeDepartment asks the judge to sentence him to one. This is what white supremacy looks like."
Lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley said: "#BreonnaTaylor should be alive & we can’t look away. Her life, Black lives, are worth more than a day. Trump Exec Order explicitly stated police should be 'unleashed.' Police must be accountable. This isn’t accountability!"
READ MORE: 'Who in the world would be stupid enough to believe that?' Morning Joe torches Trump
Journalist Brian Fydenborg wrote: "People can argue that MAGA isn't inherently racist. Those people would be f------ wrong. For how else can you explain that Breonna Taylor's life is worth 1 day? So blatant it's literally designed to spark riots, so Trump can send in troops. L.A. was warmup."
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AN 525
The Department of Justice (DoJ)'s civil rights division is reportedly facing significant internal disruption. This unrest is linked to a shift in focus away from police and voting-rights cases and towards culture-war topics such as discrimination against Christians and transgender participation in sports. As a result, over half of the division's lawyers are anticipated to resign, according to an articled published in The Bulwark Tuesday.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who runs this crucial division, has been unusually active on the social platform X amid this crisis.
"Like Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, Dhillon represents an experiment in whether right-wing media personalities can transfer their attention-seeking skills into running the federal government," said the Bulwark article, written by journalist Will Sommer.
Sommer described Dhillon as "a California lawyer who became prominent in MAGA media for championing conservative legal cases, especially opposition to COVID mandate."
READ MORE:Virginia's bonkers gay scandal exposes a big MAGA divide
Dhillon, who has over 1 million followers on X, has posted on the platform more than 263 times, per the report, excluding the content she has re-posted.
Dhillon frequently engages in online arguments on X, where she appears to have little tolerance for criticism. She told social media users who criticized her that she has "muted" them for general impoliteness or "dimwittery."
In one instance, the piece notes, this applied to someone who responded to a post by Dinesh D'Souza rather than one of hers.
In an April post, Dhillon solicited suggestions from her followers about which podcasts and television programs she should prioritize for media appearances.
READ MORE:Florida Republicans aren't putting up with Ron DeSantis' temper tantrums anymore
“Do something,” replied a user to her post, adding: “Is the entire DOJ obsessed with TV hits??”
“Muted for being a jerk,” Dhillon said in response.
Since taking office, she has publicly stated that she has muted 30 individuals and blocked one, averaging 1.35 blocks or mutes daily.
Meanwhile, Dhillon has acknowledged that the civil rights division is facing a severe exodus of employees. During an interview on Glenn Beck's podcast, Dhillon said approximately 100 lawyers have already resigned and more are expected to quit. She suggested that up to 70 percent of the division's staff could ultimately depart.
AlterNet reached out to a DoJ spokesperson for comment.
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Harmeet Dhillon, a far-right attorney who was confirmed by the Senate to head the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division on Thursday, has been called an "enemy of civil rights" by some commentators.
Picked for the position by President Donald Trump, Dhillon was confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 52-45.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Dhillon's firm played a significant role in numerous Republican initiatives aimed at challenging election results in critical states, especially in Arizona. There, she was employed by Kari Lake, a former gubernatorial candidate, and Abraham Hamadeh, a former candidate for attorney general, both of whom denied the legitimacy of the election.
An MSNBC articlepublished Friday argued that this development promotes a MAGA supporter who has aimed to weaken the civil rights of many Americans to a key position that is meant to protect those rights.
"Dhillon is a key cog in conservatives’ vision for 'lawfare' — that is, weaponization of the law against political opponents," wrote Ja'han Jones, an MSNBC opinion blogger.
Jones noted that she co-chaired the group "Lawyers for Trump."
"She and her law firm have arguably been as rabid as anyone in attacking Americans’ voting rights and pushing bogus claims that Trump was cheated out of victory in the 2020 presidential election," the article said.
In late 2022, Dhillon unsuccessfully attempted to unseat Ronna McDanielas the chair of the Republican National Committee. Dhillon’s primary argument during this campaign was that the GOP should allocate more resources for a larger team of lawyers to support conservatives in their legal battles and limit Americans' access to voting.
READ MORE: 'A pipeline to MAGA': How this Christian podcast is selling young women on Trump’s agenda
"She is, in a variety of ways, an enemy of civil rights. And if you’ve been watching Trump’s other selections for top government posts, most of whom are antagonistic to the goals of the agencies they now lead, the reason Dhillon was chosen seems clear: to pervert the DOJ’s civil rights division and ensure it suits Trump’s illiberal ambitions," the MSNBC article said.
Another article published in Democracy Docket Thursday said: "Dhillon has been a fixture in the GOP and a close ally of Trump since his first administration."
"She served as a legal advisor to Trump’s 2020 campaign and, as votes were still being counted in key swing states, went on Fox Business to spread election conspiracy theories, calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and help Trump win," the article added.
Before Dhillon’s confirmation, a group of 75 civil rights groups sent a letter seeking opposition to her nomination. Led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the letter said Dhillon's track record is "disqualifying."
READ MORE: The 'honeymoon might be over': Here’s why Trump 2.0 is flailing
“Ms. Dhillon’s lack of independence and record of going after the rights of the very people that she would have the duty to defend is disqualifying,” the letter reads.
“With the attacks on our multiracial democracy and civil and human rights already underway at the DOJ, it is critical that the Civil Rights Division fulfill its responsibility to vigorously enforce the nation’s landmark civil rights laws," it added.
READ MORE: 'Lunatics and losers': Trump criticizes ruling against far-right leader in late night post
RWW
02/07/2025
by
The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department has historically played a crucial role in defending voting and other civil rights. Harmeet Dhillon, President Donald Trump’s choice to head the Civil Rights Division, has “a history of attacking voting rights,” according to Democracy Docket, which has called her “one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country.”
Dhillon wrote in a 2022 column in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter that the Justice Department’s power to administer the Voting Rights Act “was once necessary to push back on Jim Crow laws,” adding, “But the era of Jim Crow is long gone, and it shouldn’t be up to a politicized DOJ to dictate what election integrity looks like.”
Dhillon’s confirmation “would make a mockery of the concept of civil rights,” wrote MSNBC’s Ja’han Jones, who concluded that Dhillon “is just about the worst person imaginable to have in a position tasked with defending democracy and stemming real oppression.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 denounced programs designed to encourage diversity, equity, and inclusion in educational and economic opportunity as “invidious schemes” and called for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to focus on using “the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that engage in what Project 2025 describes as discrimination. The Trump administration has already launched a purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs from federal agencies, and Dhillon seems poised to carry the administration’s war on shared opportunity into the private sector.
Dhillon sued Google on behalf of a male employee who was fired after writing a memo that upset many colleagues by criticizing the company’s diversity policies and saying biological differences between men and women partially explained why there were more men in the tech industry. Dhillon’s lawsuit claimed Google was discriminating against white men. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2020 after the employee and Google agreed to end the case.
Dhillon’s record—CNN reported that she has shown “a hostility toward trans rights”—also suggests she will pursue the Trump administration’s already aggressive campaign against transgender people and their allies. “Increasingly, schools are pushing radical gender ideology on young students and social transitioning vulnerable children—without parental notification or consent,” Dhillon’s Center for American Liberty claims.
Dhillon is yet another former Trump lawyer being named to top legal positions. She was a legal advisor to his 2020 presidential campaign and co-chair of Lawyers for Trump. After the 2020 election, she promoted Trump campaign complaints about voter fraud and called on MAGA Supreme Court justices to get involved. “We're waiting for the United States Supreme Court - of 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."
In 2022, Dhillon used Hillsdale College’s Imprimis newsletter to reach its right-wing readers with claims that the FBI’s carrying out a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was “a political tool to smear pro-Trump voters and candidates” and “a vindictive and politically-motivated fishing expedition.” In the same article, she characterized people who took part in fraudulent fake-elector schemes in 2020 as “those who participated in the political process as alternate electors.”
In 2024 she represented Trump against efforts in several states to keep him off the ballot for supporting insurrection. She and her law firm have also represented other MAGA officials trying to overturn election results, notably Kari Lake, who fought to overturn her defeat in the Arizona governor’s race.
That’s not all. More from Democracy Docket:
And as a frequent counsel for the RNC and various conservative groups like Citizens United, Dhillon’s firm has filed amicus briefs supporting discriminatory congressional maps in Alabama and a fringe right-wing legal theory in a case from North Carolina. Both cases made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately struck down Alabama’s map and rejected the radical independent state legislature theory.
Dhillon founded the nonprofit Center for American Liberty, which claims to be fighting a “coordinated assault on our civil liberties from corporations, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and inept or biased government officials.” An investigation by The Guardian in 2023 reported that the nonprofit paid Dhillon’s law firm more than $1.3 million while the nonprofit was also paying her a $120,000 salary for working two hours per week.
Dhillon’s unsuccessful 2022 effort to replace Ronna McDaniel as chair of the Republican National Committee was backed by MAGA figures like Charlie Kirk, who has called the 1964 Civil Rights Act“a huge mistake.” That same year, she seemed to promote right-wing conspiracy theories circulating around the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.
Like a number of notorious far-right figures, Dhillon was connected to the Dartmouth Review; while she was editor-in-chief it published a column denounced as antisemitic for comparing the university’s Jewish president to Adolf Hitler.
Trump administration leaders have already ordered a freeze on all civil rights enforcement actions and told department lawyers that it might reconsider consent decrees the Biden administration finalized to bring reforms to police departments where investigators had found patterns of racial discrimination and civil rights abuses. As The New York Times noted, “During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department walked away from several high-profile cases involving misconduct by major city police departments, and lawyers who specialize in such cases have said they expect the second Trump administration to do much the same.”
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msnbc marc elias voter suppress , tried to beat ronna on that?
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an 12 24
Harmeet Dhillon, a right-wing attorney based in Northern California, is President-elect Donald Trump's pick to head the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) civil rights division. If Dhillon is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she would possibly be reporting to former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi — who Trump nominated for U.S. attorney general after former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) withdrew from consideration for that position.
According to CNN, Dhillon "is expected to use the powerful perch to reverse many of the Biden Administration's civil rights initiatives."
CNN reporters Paula Reid, Devan Cole, Katelyn Polantz and Casey Gannon, in an article published on December 11, explain, "If confirmed, Dhillon would be in a position to upend the division's work on a range of hot-button areas, including transgender rights, voting and policing. In particular, the division is expected to try to dismantle DEI policies at schools, government agencies and other public institutions, according to the sources familiar with the planning."
READ MORE:If Trump decides to stay in 2028, this is how he will do it
Trump, the journalists note, has praised Dhillon for "suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers."
"A longtime litigator, including for Trump, she's also been involved in a host of First Amendment lawsuits, disputes over COVID-19 restrictions and cases concerning gender-affirming care," the CNN reporters observe. "Decisions by schools and employers to embrace DEI initiatives have come under fierce opposition from the right in recent years. Critics say DEI programs are discriminatory and attempt to solve racial discrimination by disadvantaging other groups, particularly white Americans. But supporters insist the decades-old practice has been politicized and widely misunderstood."
The journalists point out that "a key early sign of the ideological shift could emerge in the federal government's challenge to Tennessee's ban on gender-affirming care for minors," adding, "The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in the challenge, which was brought by Clarke’s Civil Rights Division in 2023."
One DOJ alumni who has strong reservations about Dhillon is Justin Levitt, who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ's Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama.
READ MORE:MAGA attorney threatens senators with private investigations if they reject Trump nominees
Levitt told CNN, "The Civil Rights Division's historical mandate from the beginning was to help fight against othering, was to help fight against societal branding of certain Americans as other. And I am concerned the prospective nominee's approach has been to lean into branding people as other rather than fighting against it."
:{:{READ MORE:'About to cut my mic': Frustrated CNN host told to end segment amid fight with GOP guest}:
*Read CNN's full reportat this link.
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RWW 12/10/2024
by
- Edith Olmstead @ The New Republic: Trump’s Defense Pick Is Now Denying Things He Said on Tape
Pete Hegseth is straight-up lying about his past now.
- Kristen Holmes @ CNN: Matt Gaetz to join One America News as an anchor, source says
Former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is expected to announce he is joining One America News Network (OAN) as an anchor, a source familiar told CNN.
- William Vaillancourt @ The Daily Beast: Trump Gives Anti-Woke Warrior Key Civil Rights Role
President-elect Donald Trump nominated Harmeet Dhillon as assistant attorney general for civil rights, he announced Monday.
- Warren Throckmorton @ The Throckmorton Initiative: No, the Founders Didn't Debate the Bible During the Constitutional Convention
Now, this is a doozy. Reconstructionist pastor and author George Grant was on The "Reformation Red Pill" podcast yesterday (12/8/24) and did what Christian nationalists often do with history — make it up.
- Media Matters: Far-right conspiracy theorist Ann Vandersteel says she's had “private conversations” with Trump “border czar” Tom Homan about mass deportations
Vandersteel: Homan “has been very clear to me in private conversations that it is going to take a network of law enforcement.”
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an 12 24
Trump announced on Monday his nomination of Harmeet Dhillon for Assistant Attorney General to the Civil Rights Division.
According to The Guardian's Hugo Lowell, "Harmeet’s law firm partner David Warrington has already been nominated as White House counsel."
Several journalists and political experts reacted to the announcement via social media.
:{:{READ MORE:Expert lays out 3 'disturbing' steps Trump just took to secure MAGA administration}:
Mitchell Epner replied: "The only positive thing I can say about Harmeet Dhillon (just named by President-Elect Trump to be AAG for Civil Rights) is that she is not Dinesh D’Felon or Laura Ingraham. Rather, she is the person who saw them blaze a trail for evil & repression at the Dartmouth Review and followed their lead."
David S. Bernstein wrote: "Trump names Harmeet Dhillon AAG for Civil Rights. Another FNC contributor for those keeping lists. Best known for failed attempt to become RNC chair. Not trusted by some on the right.
Historian Aparna Nair commented: "Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Harmeet Dhillon will not be the only desis working for Trump, there will be more, and I only wish there was be a reckoning in our communities with our proximity to and yearnings for fascism, Modi included."
READ MORE:'Clearly aren’t vetting': GOP sen says Trump 'botched up the nomination process pretty bad'
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docket
President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that he’s nominating conservative lawyer and former California GOP vice chair Harmeet Dhillon as the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Trump made the announcement on his social media platform TruthSocial, writing that, throughout her career, Dhillon “has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.” He also noted she “is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”
Through her work with the law firm that she founded in 2006, Dhillon has become one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country. In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in more than a dozen different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump’s efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election, according to Democracy Docket’s litigation tracker.
But beyond her legal work, Dhillon has emerged as a loyal ally of Trump — and a mouthpiece for right-wing conspiracy theories and talking points. She also founded the nonprofit legal organization the Center for American Liberty (CAL) in 2018 with the stated mission of “defending the civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.” Since its founding, CAL has been a source of controversy for Dhillon. The Guardian exposed that CAL was paying the Dhillon Law Group for legal work — an arrangement that raised eyebrows among ethics experts.
Dhillon also has ties to the controversial legal activist Leonard Leo. According to research from the investigative watchdog Accountable.US, Dhillon was also chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association the same year that the Dhillon Law Group was a $10,000 “gold sponsor” of its annual national policy conference. The only other “gold”-level sponsor last year was the Leo-backed Concord Fund, sometimes known as the Judicial Crisis Network.
Most recently, Dhillon represented Trump and various GOP plaintiffs and defendants in election-related cases throughout the ‘23-’24 election cycle — including defending Trump against the various stateefforts to have him removed from the ballot for violating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. When the Colorado GOP asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify former Trump from appearing on the state’s primary ballot, Dhillon tweeted how “Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history.” As the assistant attorney general for civil rights, her role, as Trump wrote, will be to “enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY.”
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ggl 12 24
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Legal Defense Fund
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21 hours ago — On Monday, Trump announced that he had selected the MAGA-aligned lawyer to be the assistant attorney general for civil rights. If Dillon is ...
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https://www.washingtonpost.com › ... › Justice
11 hours ago — Harmeet K. Dhillon, a Trump loyalist, would oversee federal efforts on antidiscrimination and voting rights cases.
Trump names California GOP's Harmeet Dhillon for civil ...
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8 hours ago — President-elect Donald Trump named Harmeet Dhillon to lead the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division.
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The Leadership Conference Statement on the Troubling ...
The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
https://civilrights.org › Media & Resources
23 hours ago — “The nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to lead this critical civil rights office is yet another clear sign that this administration seeks to advance ...
Harmeet Dhillon - POLITICO Playbook Power List
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Civil rights attorney and RNC committeewoman for California. Harmeet Dhillon had just wrapped up her latest hit on Fox when the Republican National ...
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recall unity theme post assass
07/17/24
July 16, 2024, edition of Candace Owens, posted to YouTube
CANDACE OWENS (HOST): First and foremost - and I say this with the most kindness in my heart, I actually love her as a lawyer. I think she has been tremendous in fighting for American freedoms and defending the Constitution. Harmeet Dhillon — we're gonna — I'm gonna go ahead and show you guys in case you missed it. But she is a leader. Obviously she's a Republican leader, and she decided to lead the Republican National Convention with something known as an Ardas, OK? It is a -- I guess it's a song. It's also a prayer, and it is something that is done if you adhere to Sikhism. So I just wanna go ahead and show you guys a clip of that taking place on the RNC stage. Take a listen.
...
OWENS: OK. I'll let you guys comment. I got — for me, I just thought, first and foremost, what is this? Secondly, who is this for? Who is the intended audience? I guess, what is the RNC for? What is the purpose of the RNC? What is this convention about? Are we trying to bring voters in? Are we just trying to assert who we are as conservatives? If it is the former, how does this help? If it is the latter, how does this help? That gets where I was. I said, what is this? Literally, why? Why is this? I thought to myself. Again, this is not a personal jab at Harmeet Dillon. She's definitively somebody who punches for America and should be supported. But whose idea was this? That was the other thing. When you sit around and you're like, OK, we are planning the Republican convention, who rose their hand and was like, what if we do something known as the Ardas? And then someone said, tell me more. What's that? And they said, oh, actually, if we didn't know about this well, first and foremost, seven percent of Americans are Asian-Americans. And of that seven percent, one percent adhere to Sikhism. Oh, tell me more. And of that one percent of the seven percent, they do this prayer. And then someone in that meeting said, yeah. No. Go with that. That's definitely the thing to do. Huh? What?
This is why I think — and this is a moment in which I think a lot of people were responding going, what are we doing here? Are we now the same party that critiques DEI and then also practices it at certain points? Because this, for me, if I'm running the RNC, if I'm running the convention, I'm going this is just — it's not emblematic of America. So I said, you can find a melting pot in different cultures within America, but this is not something that patriots are rallying behind. This is — it doesn't make any sense for this to be on the RNC stage.
So I saw this. I didn't think it made any sense. And I can tell you, for those of you who are like me going, what is what is Sikhism? I have no idea what this is. Here are the basic five tenets of it. They believe there's only one God, that God is without form or gender. Everyone has direct access to him. Everyone is equal before him. And a good life is served as part of a community by living honestly and caring for others. They also do not believe in empty religious rituals, and superstitions have no value. So I hope that helps you a little bit. That, by the way, those religious tenets, that is as offered by the BBC. I — if you were as confused as me, I hope now you have some clarity. And by some clarity, I mean you should still be utterly confused as to why the RNC thought that that was a necessary thing to include in its evening program.
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mma 1 23
Ahead of the Republican National Committee’s vote on who will lead the group following disappointing results in the 2022 midterms, Fox News personalities are pushing to replace the current chair Ronna McDaniel with Harmeet Dhillon, a long time regular guest on the network, which is one of the most influential players in Republican Party politics. Prime-time Fox stars Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have been especially vocal in their support.
Dhillon has made 16 weekday appearances on Fox since the midterms, 15 of them on either Carlson or Ingraham’s show.
Dhillon announced her bid on Tucker Carlson Tonight on December 5. Carlson responded, “I love it. I can vouch for your toughness, it’s absolutely real and much needed. … We’re rooting for you.”
Video
Since then, Dhillon has appeared multiple times on his show. Referring to McDaniel, Tucker Carlson said that “Republicans seem to have this instinct to reward failure and mediocrity,” asking, “How could anybody, how could any RNC member, for a moment, consider supporting that person?” On January 11, Carlson praised Dhillon as someone who “plans to try and change” Washington, D.C. Most recently, on January 24, Carlson remarkedthat she makes a “persuasive case” for her candidacy when Dhillon appeared on his show.
Shortly after announcing her bid, Dhillon appeared on The Ingraham Angle, where Laura Ingraham claimed “The Angle likes Ronna McDaniel a lot … but the results do speak for themselves, she’s right about the house flipping but it’s time for change at the RNC.” Ingraham said about Dhillon, “It's time to look for new leadership that will revitalize the RNC and help the party move to victory after victory in 2024. And that would mean supporting our next guest.”
Video
In mid-December, Laura Ingraham said that “everyone has to move on after a period of time unless you have such stunning success that is just undeniable,” and pointed to right-wing media calling for McDaniel to resign.
Dhillon also appeared on Ingraham’s podcast on January 25, where the host asked Dhillon why supporters of Trump would be supporting Ronna McDaniel for chair, to which she responded “I could not presume to tell you why these folks … think it’s a great idea that we continue our current path which has led us to loss.” Ingraham also told Dhillon, “We’re rooting for you, Harmeet, all the way.”
But her support extends beyond prime-time hosts on the network.
On Steve Hilton’s Fox show, The Next Revolution, Hilton praised Dhillon, saying, “I’m so impressed with the way you’ve just totally shaken things up.” Hilton also congratulated Dhillon for her strong grassroots support from the GOP.
Video file
Guest hosting The Ingraham Angle, Fox News contributor Sean Duffy told Dhillion that a poll of GOP voters “found you receiving 86% percent of support to just 14% for Ronna McDaniel,” and asked, “Harmeet, will enough RNC members listen to the will of the voters, are you going to win this race?”
In a discussion about Ronna McDaniel’s re-election chances on Special Report with Bret Baier, Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen claimed, “The Republican Party has performed disastrously in three success elections we have lost the House, we’ve lost the Senate, we’ve lost the presidency, and we just squandered the most promising political environment in a generation, despite the worst inflation in 40 years. … That is not a case for continuity of leadership.”
At an event “down the road” from the upcoming RNC vote, Dhillon surrogate and former senior advisor to Kari Lake’s gubernatorial campaign Caroline Wren spoke on behalf of her preferred candidate, and remarked on Fox News’ opposition to Lake. According to Semafor reporter David Weigel:
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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/paul-pelosi/
conspir?
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delay b/c no atty to accept
https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/j6-committee/ subpoena sent (dhillon)
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https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/harmeet-dhillon-we-are-rooting-you-tucker-carlson-tries-get-his-own-rnc-chair
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an 12 22
Although Ronna Romney McDaniel is Sen. Mitt Romney’s nieceand a fellow Republican, Romney has been much more nuanced in his conservatism. Romney hasn’t been shy about calling out the extremes of the MAGA movement and pushing back against former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The 49-year-old McDaniel, on the other hand, has been a Trump loyalist and an in-your-face culture warrior.
Regardless, some people in the Republican Party believe that she isn’t enough of a fighter. And according to Politico reporters Natalie Allison and Meridith McGraw, McDaniel’s critics are being increasingly vocal about their desire to oust her as chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC).
“Ronna McDaniel’s path to another two-year term leading the Republican National Committee faces a major obstacle: Some of the loudest voices in the conservative movement are calling for her to go,” Allison and McGraw explain in an article published by Politico on December 19. “As she seeks a rare fourth term as RNC chair, McDaniel is facing fierce criticism from a horde of right-wing media figures who reach millions of GOP faithful. Now, McDaniel has to hold down her support on the committee for five weeks as a grassroots army rages against her.”
READ MORE: 'We need to win': Kristi Noem blames GOP Chair Ronna McDaniel as Republicans 'continue to lose'
The Politico reporters continue, “Since the midterms, RNC members say their inboxes have been clogged with hundreds of e-mails each week — and the uproar has now turned to the RNC’s spending on events, private travel, luxury accommodations and other expenses in an election cycle that didn’t deliver strong GOP wins. McDaniel’s top opponent is Harmeet Dhillon, an RNC committeewoman from California and election law attorney who has represented Donald Trump.”
The movement to oust McDaniel as RNC chair has grown increasingly “contentious,” according to Allison and McGraw. And one of her most vocal critics is Fox News’ Tucker Carlson.
At a Turning Point USA gathering in Phoenix on Saturday night, December 17, Carlson said of McDaniel, “You’re flying on private planes with the money that, like, sweet, terrified Republican voters have sent to you from the middle of the country. And you’re losing elections. No. If you win elections, well, we can talk about it. If you’re losing, get out. We cannot reward incompetence.”
On January 27, 2023, the RNC will be holding its election for leader. According to Allison and Meridith McGraw, letters of support for McDaniel “number as many as 107 of the RNC’s 168 voting members.” But Dhillon is hoping to pull some of those 107 over to her side.
READ MORE:'I'm not into the blame game': RNC chair refuses to admit that Donald Trump is a drag on the GOP
Roger Villere, an RNC committeeman who is backing Dhillon, told Politico, “She was elected three times without opposition, and we’ve lost all three times, all three cycles. You could say she’s spending that money to help us win, but we’ve been losing.”
The Politico reporters note that Fox News’ Laura Ingraham is among the media figures who has been turning up the “right-wing heat” on McDaniel. Ingraham has called for a “changing of the guard” at the RNC.
“A host of other conservative media figures, some of whom are longtime McDaniel critics, have also joined forces in recent days to bash her leadership or to promote Dhillon,” Allison and Meridith observe. “They include Charlie Kirk, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, Dan Bongino, Lou Dobbs, Kurt Schlichter and Erick Erickson. McDaniel has received on-air support from commentators such as Hugh Hewitt and Kellyanne Conway.”
READ MORE:'Miss Piggy': RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel blasted by conservatives following reports of lavish spending
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2022 red trickle it's baaaa-aa--c-c-c-k! blake, swoboda2?
The Republican Party, trapped in a right-wing media bubble that bolsters its most extreme and alienating factions, blew its opportunity to make big gains in the 2022 midterm elections. And the party shows little sign that it is interested in changing course.
The Republican National Committee announced on Tuesday that it is commissioning a post-election review of the party’s dismal performance and launching a new “Republican Party Advisory Council” to help direct its strategy going forward. Both bodies are stocked with representatives of the GOP’s most extreme elements.
On the council, diehard Trumpists are repped by the former president’s longtime adviser Kellyanne Conway, Christian nationalists by evangelical leader and anti-LGBTQ bigot Tony Perkins, and fascists by Peter Thiel disciple Blake Masters. And the review will be co-chaired by Harmeet Dhillon, an election lawyer, 2020 election conspiracy theorist, and Fox regularwho has made at least 314 appearances on the network since August 2017, including at least 56 this year.
Dhillon discussed the review in yet another appearance on the network on Wednesday night and telegraphed that it would do nothing to disturb Fox personalities or their viewers. Prime-time host Laura Ingraham introduced her by celebrating that “someone with common sense is going to be leading the GOP’s autopsy." [vid ingr]
dhillon used the opportunity to debut “some very specific ideas of things that we need to change in order to win,” which were purely mechanical. She complained that “we are not doing what the Democrats do, which is making sure that we hunt down every Republican ballot and get it to the polls,” and said that the party needs to “get smart” about funding its candidates, pointing in particular to how Masters was “ripped off by Senate leadership.” She further called for moving the RNC’s functions “out of D.C. and back into the country” and conducting “more lawfare.”
She also nodded along as Ingraham said that “the America First folks at the RNC have to be more powerful and stronger than the old establishment types.”
In a Twitter thread after the appearance, Dhillon called for an “Elon-style review of consultants & culture” to weed out anyone who is not “totally energized & psyched to elect Republicans popular w/our base.”
Dhillon’s diagnosis is not that GOP primary voters picked bad candidates like Masters who failed because they creeped out the electorate, but that they selected good candidates like Masters only for the party establishment to knife them in the back. Her solution is to purge dissenters and shrink the size of the party’s tent down to true believers who are ensconced within the right-wing media bubble.
This doesn’t make sense. The GOP had popular outgoing governors who spent their years in office cultivating a more moderate brand – but the base wanted and nominated extremists to succeed them who ended up losing to Democrats. It put forward extremists for key swing state Senate and gubernatorial races who were popular with Fox hosts but couldn’t make the sale with voters.
The party simply can’t admit that it ran bad candidates because that would amount to an indictment of its base and the right-wing propagandists who influence their votes. No one should expect the GOP to exit its bubble any time soon.
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Harmeet Dhillon: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
Published 2:43 pm EDT, March 10, 2017 Updated 2:47 pm EDT, March 10, 2017 4 Comments By Daniel S. Levine 1.7k
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Harmeet Dhillon Trump, Harmeet Dhillon, Harmeet Dhillon Justice Department
Harmeet Dhillon at the 2016 Republican National Convention. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Harmeet Dhillon gained attention for delivering a Sikh prayer during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Now, the 48-year-old California lawyer is in the running to lead the Justice Department’s important Civil Rights Division under Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump. Dhillon is also vice chair of the California Republican Party.
Ifshe’snominated and confirmed, she would be the first permanent female lawyer to hold the job. In 2014, President Barack Obama named Vanita Gupta to be the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division on an interim basis. She was never confirmed to the role which remained open after Tom Perez became the Secretary of Labor.
Dhillon has been married three times. She was first in an arranged marriage, which ended after the man abused her. She was then married to Dr. Kanwarjit Singh. In 2011, she married her third husband, Sarvjit Randhawa. She does not have any children.
Dhillon was born in Chandigarh, India. Her parents first emigrated to New York, then later moved to North Carolina. As SFGate notes, she also has a brother, Manddeep Singh Dhillon. Her father, Tejpal Singh Dhillon, is a physician and her mother is Parminder Kaur Dhillon.
Here is a look at Dhillon’s life and career.
- Dhillon Met With Jeff Sessions About the Job Last Week
Harmeet Dhillon, Harmeet Dhillon Trump, Harmeet Dhillon bio
(Harmeet Dhillon’s LinkedIn Profile)
The Wall Street Journal reported on March 9 that Dhillon is being considered to lead the Civil Rights Division, which is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights and voting rights. It also leads investigations into alleged violations of these laws.
Sources told the Wall Street Journal that Dhillon met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week. Sessions has been criticized for how he has handled the division so far, especially for a “pull back” on civil rights lawsuits against local police departments.
Dhillon has defended Sessions, writing a San Francisco Chronicle op-ed about Sessions being accused of racism during his confirmation hearings.
“Sessions was denied the judgeship more than 30 years ago on the basis of flimsy, biased and manifestly unfair accusations, many of which were later recanted or found to be false,” she wrote.
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2. Dhillon Represented Trump Supporters in a civil Rights Lawsuit Against San Jose Police
Last year, The Associated Press reported that Dhillon was representing 14 Trump supporters who said that the San Jose police department violated their civil rights by not protecting them during Trump’s June 2, 2016 rally in the city. Police arrested 20 people at the rally and the lawsuit claims that 24 people reported assaults. The defendants accused the police of a slow response to the alleged assaults.
Dhillon later told the AP that the comments from San Jose officials made it clear “that their inaction was colored by political viewpoint considerations.”
As the Sacramento Bee notes, Dhillon opened that rally with the Pledge of Allegiance.
The lawsuit was not very successful. In October 2016, the The Mercury News reported that three of the four claims were dismissed by a judge. However, the judge refused to dismiss the negligence claim.
“The city wanted the case to go away altogether, and that hasn’t happened,” Dhillon told the Mercury News. “I think it’s significant that negligence stays in the case because it means we’ll take depositions from city employees about their preparation and training for the event.”
Dhillon also told CNN in January that she sees “no harm in doing an investigation” that puts the matter of voter fraud “to rest.”
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- Dhillon’s Second Husband Was Shot at in New York in 1995
in 1995, Dhillon’s second husband, Dr. Kanwarjit Singh, was shot in New York, where she was living at the time. Singh was a doctor at New York Medical Center and was shot at by a drunk man. All the bullets went wild but one, which fractured several ribs, The New York Times reported. The suspect was identified a Abu Muhammad.
The man screamed racist slurs at Singh, even calling him a “Hindu.” “Of course, my husband is a Sikh, not a Hindu,” Dhillon told the Times.
“He did a surgical residency in San Francisco, but after three years he decided to change his field to internal medicine,” Dhillon told the Times of her husband. “He wanted an easier life style. He wanted to settle down.”
More recently, Dhillon herself has been the victim of racist language. As The Huffington Post reported in 2013, when she was running for the California GOP Vice Chair seat, Vera Eyzendooren, the president of the San Bernadino County Federation of Republican Women, wrote on Facebook that “because of her religion her loyalty is to the Muslim religion.” Eyzendooren later told a local newspaper that her comments were taken out of context. Still, the comments were denounced by California Republicans.
“The views expressed by Ms. Eyzedooren in no way reflect those of the California Federation of Republican Women,” the group wrote on Facebook. “That type of hate speech has no place in our party or organization.”
WATCH: Alveda King Calls Warren’s Use of Coretta Scott King Letter a ‘Bait & Switch’
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- After 9/11, She Wrote Legal Memos to Defend the Sikh Community From Racial Profiling
Dhillon has worked to preserve the civil rights of the Sikh community. She spent the majority of her time after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks writing legal memos for the Sikh Coalition, a human rights organization dedicated to protecting the Sikh community’s civil rights, as well as the civil rights of others. The group was founded after 9/11 following the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, which was considered a hate crime.
As SFGate noted in a 2011 profile of Dhillon, she was also on the board of the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She also defended employees of Berkeley’s KPFA radio station and her third husband is a former board member of the station.
She told SFGate that she doesn’t want to challenge Roe v. Wade or same-sex marriage because she doesn’t think the government should take a stand on marriage issues.
While at Dartmouth during her teens, she joined the conservative newspaper The Review, where she found herself in the middle of a controversy. In 1988, the paper published a story about an African-American music professor who accused three students of harassment. Two were later reinstated by a judge and the case involved free speech and race.
“That was definitely a seminal moment in my life,” Dhillon told SFGate. “It was clear that my talents were more with writing and being with other people than being a doctor.”
WATCH: Sherrod Brown Reads Coretta Scott King Letter After Elizabeth Warren Couldn’t
Senator Sherrod Brown read the Coretta Scott King Letter criticizing Jeff Sessions in the Senate, even though Elizabeth Warren was not allowed to do the same.
- Dhillon Survived Abuse From her First Husband
Dhillon has been married three times. Her first husband was a doctor from India and it was an arranged marriage. As she told Voice of America, she was abused and the marriage lasted a year.
“He seemed like a good solid candidate and unfortunately it did not go that well. I was a victim of domestic violence and managed to leave the marriage after a year and went to law school two weeks after I left my husband,” she told VOA.
In her SFGate interview, Dhillon said her first husband almost “beat me to death.” She told her parents, “I know divorce isn’t acceptable in our culture, but I don’t give a damn. I’m leaving.”
She then went to the University of Virginia to get her law degree. Then, she married Singh. The marriage lasted until 2003, as their careers on opposite ends of the country made it impossible. She then moved to San Francisco to start her own law firm.
Her career in politics took off in 2004, when she hosted a house party for a presidential debate between President George W. Bush and John Kerry. Initially, San Francisco Republicans were weary of her because of her ACLU past. In 2008, she ran in the Assembly race and received 17 percent of the vote, which was the best for a Republican in her district since 1994.
“When you’re one of the best-known Republicans from the Bay Area, you are bound to attract lunatic, fringe people who will say certain things,” Shawn Steel, national committeeman to the RNC from California, told the Wall Street Journal. “She’s a gift to the Republican Party because she’s quite unafraid and very articulate.”