A judge shot down the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard, rejecting the government’s bid to withhold grant funding on grounds that it discriminated against Jews. Now, a DOJ whistle-blower has exposed what we frankly already knew: that the attack on Harvard and other universities was motivated by political animus rather than genuine concern about antisemitism.
MS NOW has the story:
The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress.
The disclosure, by Haley Van Erem, a veteran Justice Department civil rights attorney, involves investigations into whether Harvard, Brown and Columbia universities broke the law by allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses. … The complaint said that after being informed that there was no evidence to support a finding of a Title VI violation based on antisemitism at Brown, a senior Trump administration official at HHS, Daniel Shieh, agreed that there was “not a Title VI violation,” but told Van Erem and other DOJ team members at the meeting that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared.” … “Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.
If the administration were interested in fighting antisemitism, it could speak out against the right-wing media ecosystem, where raw hatred against Jews is par for the course. But it would rather launch a baseless and politically motivated harassment campaign against universities to titillate its base and bring critics to heel.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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