Washington — The Trump administration pressured its career civil rights attorneys to investigate allegations of antisemitism at the university campuses of Harvard, Columbia and Brown even though there was no factual or legal basis to do so, according to a former Justice Department attorney.
Haley Van Erem, a longtime lawyer at the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, accused political leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services and DOJ of improperly pushing staff to issue adverse findings against all three schools as part of a whistleblower complaint made public on Tuesday by Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin.
Before leaving the department, Van Erem was one of several DOJ attorneys who were involuntarily detailed to HHS to help investigate allegations of antisemitism on college campuses.
"Senior officials at DOJ and HHS departed from longstanding investigative practices designed to ensure due process, accuracy and legal compliance. Ms. Van Erem and her colleagues encountered compressed timelines to conduct investigations that compromised the ability to ensure that findings were justified and accurate," her attorneys from the Government Accountability Project wrote in a letter to members of Congress that accompanied a copy of her complaint.
"For at least some of the investigations, there was little to no factual predicate justifying opening them. When they asked questions, raised legal concerns, or sought to document their objections, they were...
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