More than 200 former staff at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division signed a letter condemning Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, and in doing so, they outed themselves as deep state actors and demonstrated Dhillon’s effectiveness in restoring the division to its true mission.
The lawyers wrote to “sound the alarm about the near destruction of the DOJ’s once-revered crown jewel,” but their complaints illustrate the problems the Trump administration seeks to address.
“There absolutely is a deep state,” John Daukas, former acting assistant attorney general in the division in Trump’s first term, told The Daily Signal in an interview Tuesday.
While many federal employees hold “career” positions that are ostensibly nonpolitical, many of them act against the president’s political appointees and frustrate the president’s agenda.
An April RMG Research poll found that 75% of the federal employees who voted for Kamala Harris last year, work in the District of Columbia, and make more than $150,000 annually said they would refuse to follow a lawful order from President Donald Trump, if they considered it bad policy.
Daukas said many Civil Rights Division career staff he worked with acted on a similar mentality.
“They acted like they were the policymakers, like they had been elected, as opposed to the president,” he recalled.
While 80% of the Civil Rights Division‘s cases are noncontroversial—fighting human trafficking or real discrimination—about a fifth concern “hot-button issues,” such as abortion, transgender ideology, and “reverse discrimination.”
Career staff “did great work” with “the meat and potatoes stuff,” but they proved obstinate on other projects, Daukas said.
Trump 45 Examples
Career staff balked when the Civil Rights Division opposed racial quotas by supporting Students For Fair Admissions’ cases against Harvard University and Yale University.
Daukas recalled that many career staff “refused to sign briefs.” The head of the education section said “all her people were ‘too busy’ to work on the case.”
“We had to cobble together this hodge-podge of people from other divisions,” including some from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut, to do the job. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Harvard, striking down racial quotas.
Career staff also balked at investigating then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., for undercounting nursing home deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The career staff “basically were dragging their feet. This is a technique they have—they just wait you out, thinking the administration will change,” Daukas recalled.
Career staff urged the politicals to investigate Texas and Indiana, instead. The political appointees wrote the letters themselves. Attorney General Letitia James, D-N.Y., ran her own investigation and found that Daukas’ suspicions were correct.
The Civil Rights Division also supported Idaho’s law banning boys from competing in girls’ sports, and the career staff refused to work on it, Daukas said.
“We had about 400 attorneys in the Civil Rights Division, but it felt like we only had 15 or 20, who were the political appointees, willing to work on controversial issues,” he added.
The Civil Rights Division Letter
The former Civil Rights Division staffers’ letter—sent Dec. 9—unwittingly testifies to the importance of Dhillon’s work.
The letter notes that Attorney General Pam Bondi dropped a lawsuit challenging Georgia’s 2021 election integrity law—which former staffers say “made it harder to vote.”
Daukas noted that the Georgia case was “totally bogus,” and that voting under the law has been easier than in many blue states. Yet the division brought the case because Biden had declared Georgia’s law “Jim Crow 2.0.”
Mentioning that case demonstrates “such a lack of self-awareness on their part,” Daukas said, because the case is “a paradigmatic example of the deep state and politics run amok.”
The letter also slams Dhillon’s decision to withdraw from settlement agreements regarding police wrongdoing in Minneapolis and other cities.
“I was involved in the investigation of Minneapolis,” after the death of George Floyd in police custody, Daukas recalled. He said the division found evidence of potential police brutality but no evidence of racism.
Despite the lack of evidence, the city of Minneapolis actually wanted a consent decree from the court, Daukas explained. “This is an inside job where they were colluding. The city wanted to be required to do these things, to spend money on social workers—it’s not like they were being punished.”
“Thank goodness Harmeet and her team pulled this one back,” the former attorney noted.
A Testament to Trump Reforms
Dhillon’s tenure marks a sea change from her predecessor under Biden, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.
While pro-abortion vandals had targeted pro-life pregnancy centers and Catholic churches, Clarke prosecuted pro-life protesters outside abortion clinics. Clarke and her division also consulted with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with the Ku Klux Klan.
Trump’s administration also marks a sea change from Biden on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” While Trump has pledged to enforce civil rights laws—which protect Americans regardless of race, sex, or religion—he has rejected the Marxist identity politics that claims the only true victims of discrimination must be from previously oppressed groups.
The former staffers’ letter complains that Dhillon “launched a coordinated effort to drive us out,” but based on the leftist bias under Clarke, the Trump administration’s approach to civil rights law, and the letter’s own complaints, it seems the effort may have been more than justified.
