In a revealing interview with Tucker Carlson, Harmeet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, pulled back the curtain on the entrenched resistance within the Department of Justice, which she described as a stronghold of the deep state. Dhillon revealed a culture of anti-MAGA defiance, marked by resistance memos circulating among career lawyers, instructing them to obstruct directives through bureaucratic tactics. Dhillon also recounted a hilarious scene of open crying sessions in the DOJ halls and mass resignations as hundreds of attorneys recoiled at her push to align the division with the Trump administration’s agenda.
TUCKER CARLSON: Your assistant attorney general, one of the greatest appointments, from my perspective, in this administration, running the civil rights division. What was it like when you showed up? What did you find when you got there?
HARMEET DHILLON: The civil rights division is the color revolution wing of the Department of Justice. Okay, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat administration, there are career lawyers who are very focused on a particular agenda there. So, when I showed up, or when I was, when the president was elected, I should say, there were over 400 attorneys in the civil rights division and about 200 staff, so a total of about 600 people. Kristen Clark, my predecessor, anti-police, open racist, got in trouble during her term for not being candid with the Senate during her confirmation hearings on some issues. So, she had a particular agenda. She got in there and she pursued that agenda aggressively. And she had all the staff to do it.
Now, under the first Trump administration, my predecessor in that job pretty much left it untouched. He told me he kind of, like, there were the career people there, if he wanted to get something done, they went to the U.S. attorney’s offices. I came in with a different perspective. I think it’s part of the promise of this administration under President Trump to fundamentally reform the government in the way that the people voted for. That means, in the civil rights division, we should be standing up for the civil rights of all Americans, not just some Americans. We shouldn’t be weaponizing the law in a particular way. We should apply those federal civil rights statutes, many of which were passed by and signed by Republican presidents and Republican administrations, evenly, and the government shouldn’t be putting its heavy thumb on the scale in most cases. But in egregious instances, we should step forward and right these wrongs.
But what I found there was a number of lawyers, I mean hundreds of lawyers, who were actively in resistance mode. There were memos out there by former government lawyers telling current government lawyers in my department how to resist if you’re given a direct order. Ask for clarification, send 20 emails, question it, slow down your response time, say it can’t be done. So, I was actually looking out for that when I came. I did my week of training after getting confirmed by the Senate. And then the next week, I was like, “Okay, guys, it’s time to get to business. I want everyone to be very clear what the agenda is here.”
So, there are 11 sections in civil rights, and I drafted memos for each of those 11 sections for the lawyers, telling them, these are the statutes. So, for example, Americans with Disabilities Act, this is the statute that we enforce, or Title 7 anti-discrimination, or some of the other federal civil rights statutes. And then that’s the baseline. And then this is the president’s agenda. These are his executive orders that he’s put out there about anti-discrimination, about anti-DEI, about enforcing our laws equally. And that’s the job. You are going to apply these statutes within the framework of anti-discrimination, even-handedly and without fear or favor. And this catalyzed hundreds of lawyers to quit the civil rights division.
TUCKER CARLSON: So, wait, they quit because you informed them of the law?
HARMEET DHILLON: Yes. And the law and the priorities, their pet projects had changed.
TUCKER CARLSON: They weren’t going to be able to do those the way that they wanted. And so, they thought that this part of the Department of Justice was just immune to democracy.
HARMEET DHILLON: It has been, I mean, there were career lawyers there who were doing the same thing no matter who’s a president. And so, suddenly, their little fiefdom that had remained untouched, like Shangri-La, was suddenly having to be responsive to elections.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s the definition of the deep state, what you just described. Elections have no effect. It’s like there’s no way to control these people. They act totally independently from the democratic system. I mean, that’s the problem right there.
HARMEET DHILLON: Well, that’s what I found. And so, in response to my memos, of course, they began leaking to the press. They began having unhappy hours, which they would invite supervisors, political supervisors, to, to make their point that they were unhappy. We got the point. And they had crying sessions, struggle sessions, crying sessions in the DOJ.
TUCKER CARLSON: They cried?
HARMEET DHILLON: Oh, there was open crying in the halls. Crying, crying, crying. Yes. And then one of my colleagues described to me, it was the last day a couple of weeks ago for some of them. They lined up in a phalanx and approached the elevator together, and then they left the building together, to show their solidarity for one another there, as if they were high school students or adults.These are 30, 40, and 50-year-old career attorneys in the Department of Justice.
HARMEET DHILLON: It’s pathetic.
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