Lawfare Daily: DOJ’s Very Online Civil Rights Head, with Quinta Jurecic and Anna Bower

[Intro]

Anna Bower: It was only, you know, several hours after this church service protest started going viral, that we started to see Harmeet Dhillon, you know, posting about it. And eventually the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, you know, investigated this, brought charges against, you know, over two dozen people who were involved in this protest at the church.

Tyler McBrien: It's the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, with Quinta Jurecic, a staff writer at The Atlantic, and Anna Bower, a senior editor here at Lawfare.

Quinta Jurecic: It seems to me that you should want DOJ to actually be putting in the time and the work to seriously investigate these cases in ways that will actually resolve the issues rather than this sort of slap dash, social media driven approach that maybe, you know there, there's a lot of sound and fury, but the end result may be very little.

Tyler McBrien: Today we're talking about Quinta's recent profile in the Atlantic of Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department.

[Main Podcast]

So, Quinta, I wanna start with you. There's no shortage of things happening in the world within your ambit, but you recently put a lot of time and effort into an amazing profile out on Harmeet Dhillon out in the Atlantic very recently, just days ago at the time of recording.

So why Harmeet Dhillon? Why did you choose to write about her?

Quinta Jurecic: Well, always good to be back on the Lawfare Podcast. So Dhillon, I think is a really interesting figure because she has a very important job, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, so she oversees the Civil Rights Division. That has always been, you know, a significant position in the Justice Department. You're in charge of really the lion's share of the government's civil rights enforcement. That can mean, you know, criminal prosecutions of civil rights violations. It can also mean investigations and civil enforcement.

Traditionally, I think I would say assistant attorney generals for civil rights have not really been a household name, even though it is an important job. Dhillon is really someone who has taken this role and her profile has really risen over the course of her time in this position. She posts a lot on X, the everything app. She shows up a lot on conservative and right-wing media, television shows, you know, YouTube, livestreams, that kind of thing. She's really kind of making a name for herself.

So there was this public profile that I thought would be interesting to, to kind of dig into and take a close look at. And then there's also just the matter of what she has done with the division. So Trump, you know, came into government, very clearly saying that he wanted to use the Justice Department as kind of a tool of his administration's agenda. He wanted to use it to go after the people he disliked.

And because the civil rights division is so centrally located in a lot of issues that kind of have really been animating MAGA in terms of, you know, affirmative action, transgender rights, gender issues of disparities between how men and women are treated, I think the Civil Rights Division was kind of at the center of the storm, and so what we've seen is that Dhillon has reoriented the division's work into kind of what I've been thinking of as like the Uno reverse model of the Civil Rights Division sort of taking its work and orienting it from away from serving the sort of historically disadvantaged communities that it has traditionally focused on, and more toward focusing on groups that we would not have put in that category.

So, you know, Christians, for example, white Americans, men. But then she has also done this at the same time as she has driven out a significant proportion of the division's workforce. So there's some statistics from Justice Connection, the organization that sort of networks current and former DOJ employees, that suggests that at one point, 75% of the attorneys who were at the division as of 2024 had left, either because they were fired, they quit. They took the DOGE deferred resignation offer, and so Dhillon is trying to restaff the division.

I think there's some indications that she's having trouble with that and we can talk about it, but that hollowing out of expertise and restaffing, I would argue along ideological lines, I think is a really important story, not only for the Civil Rights Division, but also for what it says about, you know, how the Trump administration is refashioning DOJ in its own image in ways that really no previous administration has done, and also what might the legacy of this be going forward.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, that was really helpful. That was a great overview of all the things I wanna talk about, the staffing the, obviously the posts of our most online, perhaps, civil rights division head in DOJ history.

I think it's safe to say.

Quinta Jurecic: Absolutely.

Tyler McBrien: And also, you know, this Uno reverse, as you call it. I want to also, yeah, dig into what you think Harmeet Dhillon's conception of civil rights is and how her upbringing led to that.

But first, Anna, I'm actually just really curious, 'cause I don't know the answer to this question of when Harmeet Dhillon appeared on your radar as someone who's watched the Justice Department for years, was it during the first Trump administration?

Was it more recent? I'm—yeah. When did you first hear the name Harmeet Dhillon?

Anna Bower: I mean, Harmeet has definitely been on my radar for a while because of her firm and its representation. You know, after, in the aftermath of the first Trump administration, Dhillon's firm, you know, was representing a lot of conservatives and conservative causes that I was following in the course of my work as a reporter.

She has been a Trump world figure for a long time and had a substantial, you know, Twitter following, and just lots of clout in that world for a long time before she was in her current government position. So she was on my radar, but it really wasn't until she, you know, got into government during this second Trump administration that I started really obsessively following her and her activities, her posting habits online in part because, you know, there's a lot of things that you can learn about what the Civil Rights Division might be doing or what it's interested in based on what Harmeet Dhillon is tweeting on a daily basis.

Tyler McBrien: Either intentionally or unintentionally, right?

Anna Bower: Exactly.

Tyler McBrien: Clear bit about what you saw hidden in a photo that she posted on x.

Anna Bower: Oh, right, right. So something like that, you know, there, there was this example that you've just alluded to in which Harmeet Dhillon posted a photo of herself signing a document and tried to hide the content of that document by like, putting a separate piece of paper upside down on top of it. But actually if you zoom in and, you know, enhanced the image and kind of flipped it around.

Quinta Jurecic: Computer enhanced,

Anna Bower: Yeah, exactly. Computer enhanced. If you did all of that, you could very clearly see that it was a letter that was being sent to the Ohio State University's School of Medicine. And so from that, we were able to break a little bit of news that the Civil Rights Division was looking into the Ohio State University.

And so, you know, things like that you can find out. So it's valuable from a journalistic perspective, but also just really fascinating and somewhat bewildering from the perspective of someone who's familiar with Justice Department norms because, often you don't see people who work in the Justice Department talking to the extent that Harmeet Dhillon does about ongoing investigations and arguably making, you know, very politicized statements that are not typically what you see Justice Department officials making.

So it was very interesting from that perspective. We can talk a little bit more about how, you know, there are statements that she's made that has indeed found its way into cases. And so it's just very interesting from, for all of those reasons and that's why I started following her.

Tyler McBrien: So, Quinta, other than perhaps struggles with OpSec, which to be fair to the AG is not unique to her in this current administration.

What are some of the other hallmarks of the Harmeet Dhillon Civil Rights Division? Most of which, most of what we are about to talk about, I assume are a bit of a rupture from past practice to some continuation. What are the current activities of the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ?

Quinta Jurecic: As you say, I think it's really important to distinguish between what's eruption and what's a continuation.

And one thing that you know I spoke to I think over a dozen current and former attorneys at the Civil Rights Division for this piece. And one thing that a lot of them emphasized is, you know—Look, priorities change from administration to administration, right. Particularly the Civil Rights Division, which is kind of, again, at the center of a lot of politically sensitive issues that administrations of different parties might have different opinions on.

So democratic administrations tend to really double down on enforcing voter voting rights, you know, access to reproductive healthcare, Republican administrations tend to scale down that work and scale up enforcing religious freedom issues. Right, I think, you know, a lot of us probably remember in the first Trump administration when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, there's a name you haven't probably hadn't thought of for a while, withdrew from a lot of consent decrees that the Justice Department had reached with police departments around the country.

But there, there's a range that people will move within, and the back and forth within that range is totally expected. Attorneys who, you know, career attorneys who work at the department, you know, understand that are fine with it. What we've seen now, one person described it to me as like, you know, you have the highway barriers to keep you from going off the highway. Usually it's, you know, you go between the barriers, and this is like we've crashed through the barrier, we've gone through the sound barrier and we're heading for the development.

Everything is just completely off course in a way that we've never seen before.

And so I think a really good example is one of the first things that Dhillon did in her new position. She withdrew a, the Justice Department from a settlement that had been reached with Lowndes County, Alabama, which is a poor, predominantly black county that has long, had trouble with sewage systems because of the consistency of the soil. It's in the Black Belt. And so a lot of people in the area end up having to use sort of DIY septic tank systems that don't work well. And you end up with sewage bubbling up when it rains, which is obviously unsanitary and potentially really dangerous.

DOJ under Biden had reached a settlement, an environmental justice settlement with Alabama and with the county to move forward on helping residents, you know, install functioning sewage systems. And Dhillon terminated that and said that, you know, it was something that needed to be gotten rid of under Trump's executive order, demanding that the administration stop any activity relating to DEI.

I think that, you know, Dhillon didn't really explain in her public statement why helping county install functioning sewage system would constitute DEI, but that's the mode that we're working in.

And one person who I talked to who had overseen the section of the Civil Rights Division that had been implementing that settlement said that she felt that this basically showed that the administration saw civil rights itself as DEI.

Tyler McBrien: After that first shot across the bow, I suppose, of the settlement, and I'm curious what you've observed during Harmeet’s tenure, you know, Quinta writes about an inner profile about a flood of memos that came after that, you know, as Harmeet Dhillon's intentions for this radical change of the civil rights division began to take shape. What were some of the things that you noticed?

Anna Bower: Yeah, so I mean, I'll mention a few of the things that I've been reporting on that relate to Harmeet’s work at the Civil Rights Division and some of the things that she seems to have taken a really close kind of personal interest in. One of the things relates to a protest that occurred in Minnesota at a church, and it involved protesters interrupting a church service.

And this went viral—Videos of this moment went viral on social media. And you know, a, as soon as something starts going viral and I see people on the right kind of clamoring for prosecutions. I almost immediately wonder how long it's going to be until we see some, somebody within the Justice Department make some kind of statement about it.

And sure enough, it was only, you know, several hours after this church service protests started going viral, that we started to see Harmeet Dhillon, you know, posting about it. And eventually the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, you know, investigated this, brought charges against, you know, over two dozen people who were involved in this protest at the church. And the prosecution was, is interesting because. It's using the House of Worship Provision under the FACE Act.

Now, people might be most familiar with the FACE Act because it is a statute that was enacted that has largely been used to prosecute people who try to blockade or make threats in relation to abortion clinics or crisis pregnancy centers. And there's a prong of that statute that relates specifically to those types of reproductive healthcare centers. But there's a separate prong of it that relates to people who, you know, try to interfere with or obstruct access to church services? It's been very rarely prosecuted. Actually, I think this prosecution is the first criminal prosecution under the House of Worship prong of the FACE Act.

Historically, it was, kind of, you know, thought to be quite risky to prosecute people under those House of Worship provisions of the FACE Act, because of the constitutional basis for that particular provision was seen to be a little bit shaky. Basically the gist of it is that it's not clear that there is a Commerce Clause basis for Congress enacting that provision of the act.

So instead, what the Justice Department often did was prosecute people who attack churches under a different provision of federal law. But Harmeet has kind of taken up this FACE Act statute as and the claimed weaponization around it. There's this claim that, you know, the Biden Justice Department weaponized the FACE Act against peaceful protestors.

And so this was a kind of big deal for her bringing this house of worship prong prosecution. She talks about it frequently, has made it very clear that it's something she has a very personal interest. In and in fact in one of the FACE Act cases, not this one that I'm talking about, but an appeal that went to the 11th Circuit related to the FACE Act, Harmeet personally argued that before the 11th Circuit so clearly has this like very, you know, personal interest in the FACE Act.

And so I've written about that and I think that part of it is very interesting, especially as it relates to, you know, we typically think of the Civil Rights Division as largely civil enforcement, but there's these other areas where it's a criminal enforcement aspect that the Civil Rights Division is looking into, and sometimes in ways that are quite unusual.

There's reporting that the Civil Rights Division is investigating Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who testified before the January 6th Committee, quite famously, and has long, you know, met the ire of Trump. For that reason, but it's a quite unusual kind of area for the Civil Rights Division to be investigating someone for testimony that they gave before Congress.

And then finally, you know, in another perspective on the criminal enforcement side of things, there's this odd kind of connection potentially between the Fulton County FBI search for election 2020 election records and Harmeet’s effort to get election records from various states, including Georgia.

Dhillon has, again, seemed to take a very personal interest, in Fulton County in particular, starting basically in the fall of last year, the Civil Rights Division, you know, started sending letters to Fulton County asking for these 2020 election records, then filed a civil suit seeking those same records, and then it was a month later basically that the FBI suddenly executed a search warrant and seized those very same records that Dhillon's office had been seeking, and that has then led to the plaintiffs in a suit seeking the return of those records, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners seeking the return of those election records, is now alleging that there's some kind of pretext, you know, a connection between Dhillon's office was unable to obtain these records through its own civil suit, and so what they decided to do was get the criminal division involved to go in and seize them.

So that's the areas that I've been looking at in terms of my own reporting and what Dhillon's been up to with the Civil Rights Division.

Tyler McBrien: I wanna pick up on that word you used a few times, unusual. Now, Quinta, as you may or may not know, I am not a constitutional law scholar, but some of these actions seem to me to reflect an unusual understanding of civil rights and the role of the Civil Rights Division, as many people call it, the crown jewel of the DOJ, as you referenced in your piece.

I wonder if you could help me understand what you think Harmeet Dhillon's conception of civil rights is, and what is motivating this, as a former civil rights division had called it, this wrecking ball to the division. And I should also note that the DOJ and I believe Harmeet Dhillon herself declined to comment.

But of course, you have this rich corpus of public posts and a very extensive in interviews with former and I believe current DOJ members. And to continue my very long windup, I wonder if you could do so by taking us back. And the profile does such a great job of tracing some of her intellectual origins, dating back to her upbringing and her time on the Dartmouth Review.

So could you give us a bit of a, like a potted history of her bio and especially, you know, how it can help us understand what she's doing now?

Quinta Jurecic: Dhillon is an immigrant. So her family, she grew up in India until she was about six years old. Her family, her father then moved the family to the U.K., then to the U.S. They ended up settling in Smithfield, North Carolina, which used to be famous for having an enormous KKK billboard outside the town.

She has said that her growing up in that kind of environment, in, you know, small town, North Carolina actually is what made her and her parents Republicans. And her stated reasoning of, and she said this on podcast, is basically that, you know, this is a state where the Democratic Party is pretty firmly in the, kind of the Dixiecrat, sort of anti-civil rights category, she said, and these are her words that it was the Republicans who were in favor of integration and equal rights for all people.

I think historically speaking, that is certainly contestable. It is definitely true that the Democratic—North Carolina Democratic Party was not a bastion of equality and justice for all for a long time. But Dhillon's parents also, she said host, did fundraisers for Jesse Helms, who is a famous segregationist until very late in the game.

But Helms did cultivate ties with Sikh activists and Dhillon's family is Sikh. She's spoken a lot about her faith. It's clearly very important to her, as you say. She then went on to Dartmouth College and joined the Dartmouth Review, which is kind of a bomb-throwing unofficial student newspaper on the right.

She eventually became the editor-in-chief there, and while she was there, both as an editor and editor-in-chief, the publication had quite a few controversies involving the reviews, let's say aggressive stories about a Black musicology professor. They published a story about the school's president, who was Jewish, that was titled “Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Freedmann,” which Dhillon as a student told the New York Times was meant to be a satirical look at how conservative students were oppressed by liberal fascism.

So she is definitely somebody who has a. Interest in upsetting the sort of liberals around her, let's say. And I think that, I would argue that something that continues really through her career and through her adult life. The form that takes is a little bit variable. So she, you know, she moves to San Francisco, she advocates for Sikh rights after 9/11 when there were a lot of sort of misplaced hate crimes against Sikhs, unfortunately. She spends a little bit of time on the board of the ACLU of Northern California.

And so what I would argue is that there's a throughline there in terms of saying, you know, I'm at the Dartmouth Review, you know, upsetting liberals by puncturing, liberal pieties than in Northern California, upsetting liberals by saying, I'm a different kind of Republican. You know, I'm not what, I'm not what all you liberals think Republicans might be.

Then she, so during that period, I think she sort of is in line with the Republican Party's attempt to move toward a more moderate self-presentation, particularly after Mitt Romney's loss in 2012, you know, and try to make the party appeal to immigrants, to people of color.

Then when Trump takes over the party, she really is all in on that, and maintains her herself as a voice within the party, but becomes a little more hard line on immigration, and I think returns to some of those bomb-throwing Dartmouth roots. And this is what Anna was talking about earlier.

She founds a firm called the Dhillon Law Group, which is now run by her brother, which sort of is very good at identifying hot button culture, war issues, and picking, you know, finding a client who's at the center of a firestorm and representing them. So she represented James Damore, who is the Google engineer who was fired from the company after writing a long memo suggesting that women were biologically less suited to be in tech.

She represents Chloe Cole, who is a very prominent detransition, she's really sort of raises her profile through, through that kind of, you know, culture war, owning the libs kind of work. And I would argue that this is really what gets her in the position that she's in today, where she's then nominated to serve as assistant AG for civil rights and has continued that kind of lib-owning mentality in her running of the division.

Tyler McBrien: I'm curious, Anna, your view on this. One thing I picked up from your profile, Quinta, is the suggestion that one of Harmeet Dhillon's formative lessons from her time at the review was the use of the media. I don't, I, I hesitate to call it media savvy because I think it also harms her in certain ways.

But Anna, how do you think about how Harmeet Dhillon uses media attention? How it helps her both personally in her career and in her, in the activities that she wants to, you know, put forth or continue? And then also maybe how it hamstrings her or harms her.

Anna Bower: Yeah, I mean, look I think it's pretty clear to me at least that having influence online in, in so far as we consider that to be a use of the media is very important to Harmeet Dhillon, you know, she spends a significant amount of her time, as far as I can tell, just tweeting things out to the world, whether it is, you know, things as kind of routine and mundane is like her gardening habits,

Quinta Jurecic: Her knitting.

Anna Bower: Lots of knitting habit content. You know, she's very into knitting. She spends a lot of time knitting as far as I can tell. Her kitchen content, pictures of her kitchen, pictures of food that she's making where, you know, walks that she's going on her exercise habits. Things like that she spends a lot of time talking about.

But then, you know, also she's doing a lot of tweeting about work as well, and she's even made very clear that often some of the things that she decides to work on are things that she's just monitoring online, you know, monitoring media reports, monitoring what is going viral online to figure out, you know, what she thinks her office should do.

I've even seen in some documents that I've reviewed, public court documents in one case that was brought against the Justice Department related to the acting of its community services program, you know, in that administrative record, one thing that pops up is Harmeet Dhillon telling people ‘look into this’ based on a tip that she's received through a DM on Twitter.

So, you know, it's very clear that she's, you know, using the internet and that medium as a way to both find things to investigate for work for the, looking at the direction of her office, but also is curating like a persona around herself.

I believe that in one of her filings her public filings related to her financial ethics disclosures prior to her working in government, there was something like $40,000 that she made in a year for the Twitter influencer program. So she's clearly, you know, making a lot of impressions on people through her tweeting, but at the same time, it can come back to bite her at least it has thus far.

So, to give you one example, Tyler, and this is a continual theme that we kind of see in the Justice Department where these norm violating communications that people at DOJ are making where they're talking about ongoing investigations will then eventually like find their way into these court cases and often in a way that is harmful to the positions that the Justice Department is trying to advance.

So one of the more recent examples of this, it relates to the Fulton County case that I mentioned where there's this pretext argument that the county is advancing as it's seeking to get its election documents back. It's saying, Harmeet Dhillon failed to get these documents through a civil suit, so therefore the criminal division went in and seized them through a pretextual warrant. And really this was all just about, you know, getting these documents for the Civil Rights Division to review. And as a part of that argument, the county wanted to get some information from the government about the timeline, like, when did the civil rights division stuff start? When did the criminal referral for the search warrant happen? Those kinds of things.

And the government said no, no, no, you can't have this information because it's privileged information, you know, it's law enforcement, ongoing investigation, deliberative process privilege, like assertive various privileges, but meanwhile Harmeet Dhillon had been going on, online on her Twitter account, and then also in various media appearances where she's trying to really talk up the work of the Civil Rights Division. And part of that is that she keeps getting asked about the Fulton County search warrant.

And at one point she even says to a reporter, something to the effect of like, oh, you know, the Civil Rights Division, we tried to get these documents this way. We tried to get 'em that way. We tried to get 'em that way and none of that worked. And so then some of my colleagues with the criminal division went in and got a search warrant and she doesn't quite connect them. You know, it's all very just kind of suggestive or implied and it's not exactly clear what she's really saying about the connection between the two.

But she's making public statements about the timeline that do help the county's argument that they're making right about this timeline and about the pretext. Meanwhile, she also has a tweet that she posts that makes it seem like there's some connection. All of this ends up finding its way into the case as this is being litigated. And again, it kind of helps the county's argument, right?

Because even though they're not able to get this information from the government because of its claims of privilege, you've got Harmeet Dhillon out there saying things that support the very theory that the county is arguing.

And so that's just one example, Tyler, of how these things really can come back to bite Harmeet Dhillon and others at DOJ, who are kind of violating these longstanding norms about talking about ongoing investigations.

Tyler McBrien: Quinta. I wanted to turn to you to see if you had anything to add on this point. But first I just wanted to pull one quote that you had, you were quoting Dhillon, who was on Tucker Carlson's podcast.

She's actually addressing criticisms of her being perpetually online. And then she goes on to say, but that's actually where I see a lot of the civil rights violations in our country being exposed, which I actually don't disagree with fully, but I probably am interpreting it in a different way than she intended.

Maybe it's where a lot of the civil rights violations in our country are being committed. So, yeah. What do you make of our very online AG of the Civil Rights Division?

Quinta Jurecic: She's definitely very online. She's definitely, as you've said, she has defended being very online as you know, the way that she does a lot of her work.

I do think Anna is totally right that, you know, there's, there is a pro and a con to this approach. It is really good if what you want is to get a lot of attention on social media and in this iteration of the Trump administration, getting a lot of attention on social media seems to actually be a significant driving factor in how policy is made. Whether you wanna call that slopulism or something else, I don't think we have a great word for it yet. But there is a real feedback loop there.

The flip side, of course, is, as Anna says, that can really come back to bite you when it starts showing up in court documents. And I think you, I mean, you see that as well in, for example the Cities Church case, the FACE Act and Section 241 prosecution of Don Lemon and Georgia for, the journalists, and then the anti-ICE protestors in this, the St. Paul church where the sort of, the fact that this case was really, gives every appearance of having been thrown together over the course of about a week and a half after people started complaining on Twitter, that's starting to show up in the shoddiness of the government's case.

And you see the judge is frustrated that they're not handing over discovery quickly enough. The government actually had to dismiss charges against one defendant, because it turned out that she was never at the protest. She had, I think it, she had parked her car nearby to pick something up in like a, another building, and the federal government geolocated her nearby and indicted her without ever bothering to, you know, interview her, check with her that she had been there.

That is really shoddy work.

And you can argue, even if you are somebody who thinks that there are, you know, there was a serious civil rights violation at that church or that you know a lot, some of the issues that Dhillon is bringing cases on are things that the Civil Rights Division should be concerned with, I think there is actually a good case that her approach to moving forward these cases should be concerning from that perspective, too.

Because if you really want justice for, you know, the parishioners of Cities Church, it's not clear to me how bringing a kind of slapdash case that every lawyer I have spoken to about this, including people who are familiar with this kind of prosecution, has said, you know, it is highly likely that this case gets thrown out because it's so shoddy.

You know, how does that actually achieve anything other than getting a lot of likes on Twitter? You know, if you think for example, that, you know, let's take the lawsuit that was recently filed against UCLA for antisemitism and employment practices by the division, for example.

So there's this lawsuit that is filed in February 2026. This is filed almost a year after attorneys in the division were told that they had one month to put together and bring a complaint against the UC system, which, so, for starters, that's backwards, right? Usually you start with the evidence and then determine whether you should bring the complaint.

But one of the attorneys who, you know, had worked on that case and eventually quit, said, you know, look like they, they give us a month to bring this investigation. They ended up bringing, actually filing the case a year later. They could have just given us time to investigate the case. And again, if you're really concerned about what you believe is anti, you know, systematic failure to respond to antisemitism at UCLA, it seems to me that you should want DOJ to actually be putting in the time and the work to seriously investigate these cases in ways that will actually resolve the issues, rather than this sort of slap dash social media driven approach that maybe.

You know there, there's a lot of sound and fury, but the end result may be very little.

Anna Bower: And similarly too, you know, we've seen in other cases, in criminal prosecutions that have been brought, the Comey case, the Letitia James case, where all of these, the volume of public statements can really, I mean it, the, those cases did not reach the merits of the selective or vindictive prosecutions claim. But in both of those cases, like the amount of exhibits that support a selective or vindictive prosecution claim. So many of them were just public statements that were being made by, you know, the president by people at DOJ.

Same thing in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, where that selective or vindictive prosecution claim is still pending, but was able to reach the, you know, kind of middle ground of the judge finding a presumption of vindictiveness. Because of public statements about the case that top administration officials were making.

And so you would think by this point, like some of these administration officials would think to themselves, oh, there's a reason why there are norms around talking about an ongoing investigation because it preserves the integrity of the case by not talking about it, right.

And so to Quinta's point, like, again, I just, I absolutely agree Quinta that like you, if you are someone who did care about preserving the integrity of these verdicts or these cases that, that you would kind of think twice about speaking out of turn, like the way that some of these people have, including Harmeet Dhillon.

Tyler McBrien: Quinta, I wanna ask you a question that was nagging at me reading the profile, and that's whether Harmeet Dhillon is a principled ideologue that sticks to her principles and that there's a very clear, like intellectual throughline throughout all of these eras or whether she blows where the Republican wins below and is does what's expedient for her career and for getting media attention—

Because in, in one light I mean, I think I ended up toward the ladder after reading the piece, I think in one light she moderates herself and positions during the Romney era, for example. But then I listened to a conversation you had with Lawfare Editor-in-Chief Benjamin Wittes, and it seemed like you, you were, your interpretation was more so the former, that there actually is this this core set of beliefs that she sticks to.

Could you speak a bit about that dichotomy?

Quinta Jurecic: I do think that, you know, there, there is a serious ideological through line here just from public statements, right? This is somebody who has always been a Republican who has always been on the right side of the aisle and whose commitments there do seem to be, you know, genuine.

There are some things that she clearly feels very strongly about. I mean, like I've said, I think she is, she seems to feel very strongly about religious freedom. That is a throughline in her work. It's work that she did for Sikh communities after 9/11. She's spoken a lot about, you know, the importance of her own religious faith in her life. And so I do think that is consistent to me.

This is something I didn't really have space to get into during the piece, but one of the ways that she kind of raised her profile near the end of the second Trump administration, or excuse me, first Trump administration, was by litigating a bunch of COVID cases for churches and other houses of worship where people wanting to gather in person, despite COVID restrictions. And she has framed that as a religious freedom issue.

So I think that, that remains very consistent, and I think you can arguably see that in, you know, the Cities Church case, for example. And other statements that she's made about, you know, caring a lot about ensuring access, you know, free access to houses of worship, whether under the FACE Act or other provisions.

She does seem to have been consistent for a long period of time in an antipathy toward affirmative action as we have typically understood it in a range of areas and a belief that, you know, the Democratic Party has been overly concerned with, what I guess we now call DEI, in attempting to alleviate historical discrepancies is that she's sort of in the model of a more traditionally conservative, you know, stop discriminating the John Roberts the way to stop discrimination on the basis of racist, to stop discriminating on the basis of race—or of gender, right? Any, anything along those lines.

I do think that has put her at odds with some aspects of the current MAGA coalition. For example, you know, people who are calling for, say pro-white affirmative action. That is a position that she has expressed real discomfort with. But then there are also issues where she, her position appears to have changed over time, sort of in line with the prevailing position of the Republican party.

So immigration, for example she, you know, previously during kind of the 2012 period, had spoken a lot about the need for the Republican Party to appeal to immigrants. Now she is taking a much, much harder line on not just irregular immigration you know, people coming here who are undocumented or don't have permanent legal status, but also even, you know, legal immigration.

She said recently on a podcast that she thought that the U.S. should be a country where, you know the immigrant doctor or lawyer is the exception. So that is something where her position has kind of changed more. So all in all, I think what I would say is that there is a real consistency here.

There is also some willingness to kind of go where the wind is blowing.

Tyler McBrien: Quinta, you teed up perfectly the place where I want to end, which is Harmeet Dhillon's future and the limits of her ambition, I guess. There's a ceiling there for her, it seems in MAGA world, not only for what she says and has done, but just who she is, Sikh woman of color from an immigrant background.

I wanna go to Anna first to, for you to speculate of what you see as Harmeet Dhillon's future. Will she continue to climb the ranks at DOJ or will she hit the shoals of racism, I guess within for lack of a better word, racism, sexism within the ascendant right in MAGA?

Anna Bower: I think I'm gonna defer to Quinta mostly on this because I'm just so curious for her thoughts.

But, you know, I would say at this point, if there's a reason why Harmeet Dhillon doesn't ascend to a higher position. I think that it might have more to do with internal MAGA squabbling than it does to do with, you know, any kind of racial or ethnic reason or discrimination or something to that effect.

But I, I think that it certainly, it seems to me that it's, you know, there's reporting that Dhillon could be promoted within DOJ. I am not entirely sure whether or not that's going to happen, but I could see it happening. I feel like, I just don't really know. Yeah.

Quinta Jurecic: I feel like the shifting coalitions are really hard to keep track of from the outside. And so Tyler, I think what you're referencing is, so after Pam Bondi, after Trump fired Pam Bondi, there was reporting that Dhillon was in the running, you know, for stepping into the attorney general role. It wasn't really clear whether that would've been an acting basis or as a formal nominee.

There was also reporting that she was going to, basically step up from her current position to the third ranking role in DOJ, the associate attorney general position. The problem of course, is that there's somebody who's already in that drop. His name is Stanley Woodward. He was a former Trump defense attorney.

So there was a very confusing period of maybe 24 hours or so where a bunch of right-wing outlets reported that Woodward had already been fired and that Dhillon was about to be promoted. And then Woodward showed up at work the next day and his name was on a bunch of court filings. And he appears to still be there. So I, for one, am somewhat confused about what exactly was happening during that period. It seems pretty clear that something was happening behind the scenes. I don't know what that something was, but Stanley Woodward still has his job and Harmeet Dhillon is still in her job.

So I think it's pretty clear that she has enough of a fan base among the kind of like MAGA influencers on X that might in this administration where that kind of thing is really important, might help boost her chances of moving upward. You know, there, there were a lot of people on the right including some pretty prominent voices posting that she should be the next associate attorney general or attorney general.

And so I could, you know, that matters in this administration. That said, it also seems pretty clear that at this point, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who's now the acting AG, is kind of settling into the role and it's a little hard for me to see how Dhillon could conceivably push him out unless, you know, Trump gets angry at him for something or another. So I guess what I'm saying to, to Anna's point is that it really is a question of kind of the coalitional politics of MAGA.

That said, I do think that the fact that, you know, for the sort of really hard right MAGA folks in line with the, you know, Nick Fuentes, Groyper faction, you know, there is a, not only a white nationalism and Christian nationalism, but specifically anti-South Asian racism that has really grown.

Among that faction, you see it, if you click on Dhillon's Twitter posts, there's some really ugly, appalling, invective being leveled at her racial slurs. People telling her to go back to India in ways that are genuinely disturbing. And I do wonder if, you know, given that all of this is about coalitional politics within the sort of the MAGA movement, who will make the people online happy, whether that be a problem for her going forward?

I think it's something that she is trying to navigate. You know, we can, again, I would've loved to ask her about this. Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance. So we can only see how she does it in the public eye. But I do think that it's, you know, it's one aspect of the tensions that Trump's movement is now facing.

You know, he sort of came into office in 2024 on the back of a coalition of voters that was more multiracial than any Republican president had managed to put together for quite a long time. And that—there's indications that base of support is now kind of peeling off and falling apart.

And I think that Dhillon, you know, has an unusually prominent role as a woman of color in this administration. And so her, she is sort of positioned in such a way that what ends up happening with her and how she navigates that might be a bit of a canary in the coal mine for how the Republican party right now handles those tensions.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I do wonder a great deal how she thinks of that tension, given that she does strike me as someone who would read the replies and see this. And she does have these moments that you, these rare moments, one that you mentioned in the piece, which she said something like she wishes there was a Groyper filter or you know, sort of a, distancing herself from Nick Fuentes and his ilk—

While at the same time, you know, occupying the same interview seat across from Tucker Carlson that Nick Fuentes did, which again caused, you know, a bit of a stir in, in the MAGA Right. But, so I lied earlier. I actually want to end where you ended the piece, Quinta, which is this recognition and acknowledgement that what you say out in the real world, the Civil Rights Division under Harmeet Dhillon's leadership has already had, has is already felt. And it's felt both in what the division is doing and not doing.

So I wanna end there. If you could just tell us a bit about what you think the legacy of Harmeet Dhillon's tenure will be, as it's felt out in the real world.

Quinta Jurecic: I think there are a few different ways. One is, you know, there are cases that this division is bringing that under a previous administration, Republican or Democratic, it would probably never have brought. And we've talked about a number of those investigations.

I think that those cases are, you know, there's damage that is done there in terms of frightening people out of exercising legitimate rights. Just the work and money that has to be put in to defend yourself against some of these, you know, investigations prosecutions, litigation.

There's also a lot of work that isn't being done, and some of that is not being done because Dhillon has reoriented the division away from those traditional priorities. Some of it isn't being done because there just aren't enough people, because everyone has left. You know, if you look at the division's press release section there, the Disability Rights Section is still, you know, they are still doing some investigations and litigating some cases, but it's not at the same level that it has been under previous administrations. Again, even under Republican administrations.

One really disturbing example that I was alerted to is if you look at, if you search for Title IX cases brought by the division under this administration, so Title IX being the civil rights statute that ensures equal access to educational opportunities between men and women.

All of the Title IX cases that this division has put out press releases about have to do with how schools and school districts are handling transgender students or transgender athletes. I could not find public records of anything that had to do with, for example, you know, sexual assault allegations, which is a very traditional use of Title IX, you know, ensuring that educational resources are not being denied to girls.

And so, you know, that doesn't mean that those things aren't happening, it just means that there's nobody there at the federal level, which has historically kind of been, you know, the backstop when states or local jurisdictions don't have the resources or don't care, no one is there to investigate and come in and sort of play that, that role.

So I will say that, you know, the attorneys who I spoke to who had left the division all, a lot of them felt very conflicted about that decision because they said, you know, look like people who are there now are basically there to do harm reduction, right? They want to continue doing their work as best they can, and they want to continue trying to protect people, but the problem is that they're just, there aren't enough of them.

And so I think that is concerning both because of all the cases that aren't getting brought and because it's kind of a green light. You know, if you're a school district, you know that nobody's gonna do anything if you have a serious sexual assault problem, for example.

And so that is not only a problem right now, but it's going to be a problem in the future under, you know—If we have a future administration that's more interested in returning to traditional civil rights work, whether Republican or Democratic, just because the division is still so understaffed that you would have to put an enormous amount of resources into re-staffing at a level where you have the resources and the expertise to pursue those cases that really, really need to be brought.

Tyler McBrien: Well, we will have to leave it on that somewhat dower note, but Quinta Jurecic and Anna Bower, thank you so much for joining me and thank you both for your reporting. Quinta, the profile was great. It really helped me understand not only this enigma that we see posting online constantly, but also just the greater dynamics of the Justice Department.

So thank you both.

Quinta Jurecic: Thank you for having me.

[Outro]

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