Career DOJ Lawyers Cannot Believe How Unserious Their Bosses Are

The second Trump administration has put Justice Department lawyers who care about civil rights in—and here I have to apologize for the legal jargon—a real pickle. On the one hand, there are of course real violations of civil rights laws happening on an ongoing basis, and a basic responsibility of a functioning government is to investigate these violations and punish those responsible. On the other hand, the powers that be in the second Trump administration do not give a shit about civil rights, which makes it difficult for anyone who is not a sycophantic right-wing culture warrior to do any actual legal work.

A whistleblower complaint released by the Government Accountability Project sheds new light on this aspect of the Justice Department’s transformation into a glorified pro-Trump law firm. In the complaint, a career government lawyer named Haley Van Erem describes how she was pulled off her cases and (involuntarily) detailed to the White House’s “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” a blunt instrument for bullying Ivy League universities that have not cracked down on Woke as much as Donald Trump, personally, would prefer. Once reassigned, Van Erem says that she and her team were pressured to conduct investigations with “little to no factual predicate justifying opening them”; forced to work on “compressed timelines” that made it impossible to “ensure that findings were justified and accurate”; and “admonished” when they had the gall to ask questions about the legitimacy of the enterprise.

In light of the “extraordinary procedural irregularities” they encountered and the “disregard” for the requirements of federal law they witnessed, Van Erem and company eventually drew the only reasonable conclusion: that “certain enforcement outcomes had been determined before the relevant evidence was collected and evaluated.” In other words, political appointees at the Justice Department decided who to punish, and tasked non-political appointees like Van Erem with cobbling together legal justifications for it.

When Trump took office in January 2025, Van Erem was serving as lead counsel on several Americans With Disabilities Act cases related to the provision of services for children with mental healthcare needs. But in March of that year, she was told that she had a more important job: to probe a series of ostensibly antisemitic incidents that occurred during medical school commencement ceremonies at Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Harvard. To give you a sense of how the nation’s top law enforcement officials are setting their priorities these days, her orientation materials included a background memo stating that the investigations were based on a single article published by the New York Post.

In her complaint, Van Erem says that at first, she tried her best to do what she thought her job was, and assumed the Justice Department wouldn’t bring down the hammer unless it could substantiate the allegations. Quickly, she found out how wrong this assumption was: After the team failed to unearth legal violations related to the medical schools, Justice Department leadership simply expanded the scope of the investigations to encompass entire universities, with a special focus on—prepare to be shocked—Muslim faculty members and professors in Middle East Studies departments. Their goal was to coerce skittish school administrators to cave; essentially, Van Erem says, she was instructed to “work backward from desired settlement terms,” and to “generate proposed findings” to support those terms.

At one point, after reading media reports that the White House was blocking a half-billion dollars in federal funding for Brown University, Van Erem and her colleagues sent an email seeking assurances that their investigation, which was just barely underway, wasn’t the basis for the decision to withhold all that money. In response, the acting general counsel for the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, summoned them to a mandatory meeting and scolded them for attempting to provide legal advice, which raises the obvious question of what, exactly, the Trump administration believes lawyers at the Justice Department are supposed to do. Van Erem also says that Keveney kicked off the meeting by referring to himself as “Angry Sean,” and that he directed attendees not to take notes, which is generally not an instruction you give unless you are pretty nervous about what a written record might suggest.

Perhaps the most notable section of Van Erem’s complaint, which is partially redacted to protect the identities of other whistleblowers, consists (for now) of just a subsection header. Back in February, Josh Michtom argued in Balls & Strikes that Justice Department lawyers should quit their jobs rather than continue to participate in Trump’s efforts to abuse the legal system to punish his personal and political enemies. It appears that the experience of being repurposed as pawns in a handful of half-assed antisemitism investigations prompted at least some Justice Department lawyers to do exactly that.

It is of course good that lawyers who take their professional and moral obligations seriously are leaving Trump’s employment, and it is even better for them to blow the whistle on the vapid, mendacious losers who are calling the shots. Van Erem quit in May 2025 after deciding that she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.”

That said, the disintegration of the Justice Department will continue to matter well after Trump leaves office. Effective civil rights enforcement depends on the availability of lawyers who understand how to do it; before resigning, Van Erem had been handling these cases for a decade, which, if you’re doing the math, means she’d held the job under Obama, Trump, Biden, and then Trump again. The departures of lawyers like her mean that even under future, less malevolent presidential administrations, the Justice Department will be less equipped to do the vital work that Trump is abandoning. Just the way he would like it.

As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading.

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