Whistleblower faults university probes

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WASHINGTON — A Trump administration task force created to combat antisemitism pushed for settlements with Ivy League universities despite government investigations that were rushed and incomplete or that failed to establish legal violations by the schools, a former Justice Department lawyer claimed in a whistleblower disclosure obtained by The Associated Press.

The complaint claims the investigations into some of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint states.

The work of the multiagency task force, launched by the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in February 2025, was “marked by extraordinary procedural irregularities, predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support” and disregard for the law and Constitution, lawyers for the former government attorney wrote in seeking watchdog investigations into their client’s complaints.

The complaint taps into a broader public discussion about the administration’s efforts to confront accusations of antisemitism at colleges, a problem that received renewed attention during campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza that some Jewish students said made them feel unsafe. President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a goal of rooting out antisemitism that he said had gone unchecked during the Biden administration, but critics have called his government’s response heavy-handed and said it infringed on free speech rights and coerced concessions from public institutions.

Lawyers for the former Justice Department attorney, identified as Haley Van Erem, filed the disclosure with the inspectors general at the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, as well as with the Office of Special Counsel.

Van Erem spent nearly a decade working in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before being involuntarily assigned to HHS to work on the Title VI investigations into the universities, the complaint says.

The health department assignees were initially told to scrutinize accusations of antisemitism at medical school commencement ceremonies — the lawyers were advised of a New York Post story describing antisemitic conduct at graduation events, the complaint says — but the inquiries were later expanded to focus on the entire schools in the cases of Columbia and Brown, according to Van Erem’s account.

Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025 because she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law,” says the complaint, which also says “officials targeted some Middle East Studies faculty for the content of their work and other professors for their Muslim faith.”

Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the department “stands behind the integrity” of its investigations.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote separately to Harmeet Dhillon, who as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been a public face of the department’s efforts to counter antisemitism. In his letter, he said antisemitism at colleges and medical schools is a real problem that needs to be investigated.

“But,” he told Dhillon, “your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature.”

The whistleblower complaint deals chiefly with investigations into three Ivy League universities: Brown, Harvard and Columbia.

It claims that in the case of Brown, the investigative team did not find evidence to support a violation of Title VI, the section of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs that receive federal funding, but that “leadership refused to permit a notice of no violation and instead sought some form of settlement or resolution despite acknowledging the absence of a legal basis for doing so.”

Investigators did find evidence of discrimination at Columbia, the complaint says, but the investigation was done on an accelerated timetable before “adequate factual development and legal review were completed” and relied on accusations that “were unsupported, based on news reports or litigation filings, or that implicated protected First Amendment activity.”…Read more by ERIC TUCKER and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER The Associated Press