The Government Accountability Project forwarded a 25-page whistleblower disclosure to four congressional committees on behalf of former DOJ civil rights attorney Haley Van Erem. It’s a damning indictment of the Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, an initiative set up to deal with the rise in anti-Semitic threats and violence, but that mostly operates as a cudgel to reverse engineer probes and legal attacks against institutions of higher learning in an effort to harass schools into settlements where no cognizable violations existed.
Law and fact “were subordinate to political priorities rather than the enforcement of civil rights,” the underlying disclosure explained. “[A]nd were implemented at the expense of regular decision-making and enforcement processes that exist to protect against constitutional and statutory violations and unwarranted, arbitrary and capricious agency actions in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.”
Among many redactions throughout the disclosure, one jumps out. As The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic noted:
You’re not alone!
Van Erem isn’t the only whistleblower in this case, and others aren’t named in the public version, which is presumably why this section is blacked out. But the important revelation is that DOJ attorneys have started to realize that their work for this administration — work that routinely involves misleading tribunals, ignoring court orders, and, as here, pursuing bad faith claims — is likely to end up impairing their law licenses. Before this administration ends, the president might well preemptively pardon everyone who aided and abetted its lawlessness, but the actors that can still deliver consequences for lawyerly wrongdoing are local law license authorities. They still have the duty and obligation to protect the public and the legal profession by disbarring the complicit.
The good news is that attorneys inside the DOJ seem to be figuring this out. Roughly 70 percent of the Civil Rights Division’s attorneys are gone, but this is the first direct acknowledgement that bar discipline concerns might be behind that.
Van Erem spent nearly a decade in the Civil Rights Division’s Special Litigation Section, amassing Distinguished Service Awards along the way. On March 21, 2025 — which was a Friday, because everything bad that happens to a lawyer happens on a Friday — she was told that she would soon be reporting to HHS. This move pulled her off five active Americans with Disabilities Act matters — including one where she was lead counsel enforcing a settlement covering services for children with mental health conditions. But those aren’t priorities for this administration, so Van Erem was sent on 45-day renewable terms to work Title VI investigations for the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.
According to the disclosure, on March 28, the DOJ informed attorneys that their investigation was “based on a New York Post article that alleged anti-Semitic activities at numerous medical school commencement ceremonies.” As the document notes as an epic understatement, “opening an investigation based on a single article was highly unusual.”
The next day, April 1, HHS Acting General Counsel Sean Keveney, along with OCRofficials, opened a briefing with the new DOJ CRT assignees by discussing the investigations. He announced the investigations’ goal was to force the schools into lawsuits that would lead to court-ordered injunctive relief requiring the schools to disgorge money received by HHS and force the universities to make up the lost grant and contract fees from their endowments. Keveney initially stated that the strategy was to include a “poison pill”—inserting an admission of liability into any settlement offer that a university would “never be able to accept,” thereby forcing a given university into court.
A government lawyer using the phrase “poison pill” should make disciplinary authorities perk up.
On April 2, Office of Civil Rights Associate Deputy Director Daniel Shieh summarized the theory of the case: “the goal is compliance, but pulling money is the tool.” On April 9, Shieh laid out a plan to systematically interview Middle East studies professors, particularly Muslim faculty, one of whom was to be interviewed not “to get information” but to see “what he will say.” Religious profiling to manufacture claims is generally frowned upon by… basic standards of professional responsibility.
When the administration started blocking grants to Ivy League institutions, “[c]an someone explain to us the authority for pulling HHS funding prior to an OCR [finding], and how it relates or doesn’t relate to our investigations?”
Within hours, all six attorneys received a mandatory summons by email to a 4:30 pm meeting with Keveney at HHS headquarters. The attorneys contacted Shieh and Hyams asking for permission to join remotely from their DOJ offices where they worked approximately 30 minutes away but were told to attend in person. They arrived at the meeting and Shieh and Hyams appeared very tense.
Keveney then entered the room and tersely declared, “Now you will see angry Sean.”
Nothing says a meeting is on the up and up like “Keveney signaled for the attorneys not to take notes during the meeting.” During the conversation, “Keveney asserted that the DOJ attorneys’ jobs were not to provide legal advice or make legal determinations.”
Which proved prophetic, because when the investigations turned up nothing, senior management blew off the idea of closing the probes, and instead redoubled their efforts on extracting settlements without acknowledging that the record turned up nothing.
Van Erem’s last day was May 30, 2025.
DOJ’s response, via spokesperson Kiersten Pels, is that the Department “stands behind the integrity” of the investigations and that “while at the DOJ, Ms. Haley Van Erem did not work on university investigations.” Suspiciously technical, since she worked on them at HHS, where DOJ sent her, for the task force DOJ created, coordinated through the division DOJ runs.
Hopefully, some day, we’ll see what’s behind that redacted paragraph. The people doing the right thing are going to want it noted for the record.
Earlier: Disbar Them All: The Only Accountability Left For Trump’s Lawyers
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
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