Welp. What appears to be an attempt to cover up a murder by the DOJ’s Civil Rights head is, unsurprisingly, just the tip of a very big anti-woke iceberg.
As we established earlier this week, Harmeet Dhillon sucks. After being hand-picked by Trump for the tongue-twisting position of U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division (CRT) and getting confirmed in a 52-45 vote in April, she has railed against “anti-white discrimination,” revised all of CRT’s mission statements, and, throughout it all, refused to shut up about how much she loves to “FAFO,” or, “fuck around and find out”—the latest maxim co-opted by Trump and his pals, previously reserved for cool kids and the chronically online.
Last week, Dhillon refused to open an investigation into the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE agent—despite her office’s key responsibility being to examine incidents where…a civilian is shot and killed by a law enforcement agent. Speaking to the Washington Post, Vanita Gupta, an Obama-era CRT official, called the decision “highly unusual.” Four top department officials have since resigned in protest.
Do a quick Google search on Dhillon, and you’ll find a slew of monikers further reinforcing her right-wing prominence: the underrated vandal, a conservative firebrand; the MAGA Movement’s Lawyer. Speaking to Jezebel, Heidi Beirich, co-founder of Global Extremism, said she’s “radically unqualified to lead the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.” But who exactly is the so-called MAGA darling—and how, exactly, did she slither her way up into the U.S. government? Let’s take a look.
Off the bat, Dhillon has long called herself a “lawyer for the pro-life movement,” and has an extensive history of trying to roll back reproductive rights. She’s asserted that shield laws violate the U.S. Constitution; called trans-affirming care “global quackery”; and, once, attempted to file a defamation suit against Planned Parenthood. (That case was, hilariously, dismissed by the judge as “ridiculous.”) In 2022, she also published an op-ed on Fox News where she baselessly floated the idea of a “saboteur” or “activist law clerk” leaking the draft majority opinion to overturn Roe. In October, she also wielded the FACE Act, normally a law to protect abortion clinics from threats, to sue pro-Palestinian protesters who protested outside a New Jersey synagogue.
Speaking about her nomination, Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Calif.), said it felt like the “middle finger to the enforcement of civil rights in the country.” Prior to her confirmation, the Legal Defense Fund sent a letter to top Democratic leaders, writing, “Ms. Dhillon portrays herself as a civil rights lawyer who makes it her job to fight what she refers to as ‘the woke mob.’” In another letter, 65 national organizations, including the NAACP, Planned Parenthood, and Reproductive Freedom For All, urged the Senate to turn her down: “Throughout her career, Ms. Dhillon has threatened the very civil rights of many communities who the Civil Rights Division was created to defend.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) was the only Republican to object to her nomination alongside every Democrat—though Murkowski will never get a thumbs-up from us.
Born in India, Dhillon’s family moved to London before settling in the U.S. As a classics student at Dartmouth University, she launched her right-wing reputation when she served as editor-in-chief of the school’s conservative newspaper. There, she oversaw a column that compared the plight of conservatives on campus to that of Jews in the Holocaust. (The piece also compared the school’s Jewish president to Hitler.) While the paper categorized the article as satire, Dhillon responded to backlash by saying the piece sought to compare “liberal fascism” with other forms of fascism. She added, “I’m very disturbed about the response to it. I’m very surprised, very very surprised.” She graduated in 1989 and then attended law school at the University of Virginia.
Dhillon accelerated to conservative stardom during the 2020 elections, and in a White House Social Media Summit in 2019, Trump titled her “one of the leading First Amendment lawyers in the country.” (Never a good sign, coming from him.) She’s used her namesake law firm (which she founded in 2006) and the far-right Center for American Liberty (which she founded in 2018) to file various lawsuits against Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) for his stay-at-home mandates during the pandemic; and defended villainous clients such as Tucker Carlson in a gender discrimination lawsuit; Elon Musk in a case against advertisers that did not want to associate themselves with Twitter; and, of course, Trump himself.
Dhillon ironically calls herself a “civil rights lawyer,” and most of her clients—as you surely have gathered—are the worst. Before nominating her, Trump bragged that she held an excellent track record on “taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech,” but what he really meant was that she represented the Google software engineer who was fired after he circulated a memo suggesting there was a biological reason why women were underrepresented in tech.
Naturally, Dhillon’s also an election denialist. She worked particularly closely with Trump in 2020 and became a co-chair of Lawyers for Trump—a group that proceeded to loudly challenge the results of the 2020 elections. As Biden swept battleground states on November 6, 2020, Dhillon went on Fox News to declare the conservative-packed Supreme Court would step in and “do something” about it. “Hopefully, Amy Coney Barrett will come through,” she said.
During the 2024 presidential election, she criticized Kamala Harris for claiming her South Asian heritage. “Yeah, I think this is going to be a little brutal, but the reputation she has among the Indian-American community, is [that] she is Indian-American at an Indian-American thrown fundraiser, and that’s it.” Two days after Trump was shot, she hosted a Sikh prayer at the Republican National Convention. “Thank you dear god, for protecting his life.” She also defended Trump in 2023 after the Colorado Supreme Court ruled to remove him from their ballots for “[engaging] in an insurrection.”
“Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history, right before our eyes, as government officials avert their eyes to the mockery of the constitution and our laws,” Dhillon tweeted in December 2023. “This is a low point in American history.” Crazy to think how much lower she’s dragged us!
Speaking of, she really, really loves Twitter. According to Democracy Docket, she tweets between her personal and DOJ accounts upwards of 100 times a day, often tweeting about ongoing litigation, criticizing federal judges and their decisions, or—infamously—picking fights with Newsom’s staffers. (She also appears unaware of the Hatch Act, as many of her tweets are openly partisan.)
And with her—and Bondi—at the helm, it didn’t take long for DOJ employees to start quitting—some of whom had served decades before stepping down. In December, about 200 former DOJ employees wrote a letter on the “destruction of the DOJ’s” CRT, writing that Dhillon “focused her efforts on ‘driving [the CRT] in the opposite direction’ of its longstanding purpose.”
“The [CRT] had already lost several staffers in the wake of Dhillon’s refocusing of the department to fighting ‘woke ideology,’ protecting abortion protesters who interfere with clinics, and other similar activities instead of protecting civil rights,” Beirich said. “Her time at DOJ has been disastrous for the division.”
Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.
