The Trump administration’s civil rights investigations into three Ivy League universities were politically motivated and designed to pressure those institutions into settlements, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney alleged in a whistleblower account Monday.
Officials pressed for deals with Columbia and Harvard universities despite hasty or incomplete investigations, Haley Van Erem, who worked in the Justice Department’s civil rights division for almost a decade, alleged. At Brown University, officials pursued a deal even after investigators concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a civil rights violation.
The outcomes of the investigations were “predetermined, without regard to evidence,” the account alleges. Moreover, Trump officials pulled vast sums of federal funding from the universities before probes were even completed.
Lawyers representing Van Erem, who left the Justice Department in May 2025, filed the whistleblower disclosure Monday with congressional leaders on both the House and the Senate’s education and judiciary committees.
In response, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House’s Judiciary Committee, launched an investigation Tuesday into the allegations. In a Tuesday letter to Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s civil rights division, he requested troves of documents related to the investigations.
Raskin also said the new account shows “just how far the Trump Administration strayed from any notion of...
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