A former Justice Department lawyer says the Trump investigations squeezed Ivy League universities for millions before they were even concluded. A top Democrat is demanding answers.
The entrance to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on April 22, 2025.Kyle Mazza / Anadolu via Getty Images
The Trump administration’s findings that three Ivy League schools violated civil rights law by tolerating antisemitism were predetermined by political priorities that blew past the evidence and cast aside standard investigative procedures, according to a whistleblower account provided to Congress.
The disclosure, by Haley Van Erem, a veteran Justice Department civil rights attorney, involves investigations into whether Harvard, Brown and Columbia universities broke the law by allowing antisemitism to flourish on their campuses.
The whistleblower account comes just days after a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit against Harvard that was based on the investigation, which was conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services and lawyers detailed from the DOJ.
Both Brown and Columbia reached settlements, with Columbia agreeing to pay $200 million over three years and Brown agreeing to spend $50 million on Rhode Island workforce development, with no admission of wrongdoing.
Harvard fought and won.
U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns ruled in that case that the Trump administration’s allegations relied on incidents that occurred more than a full academic year before it filed its lawsuit — incidents he said were “too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference” that Harvard was violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Van Erem’s whistleblower account, reviewed by MS NOW, says the findings “overrode knowing deviation from investigative procedures, statutory noncompliance, and potential constitutional violations.”
“Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.
In a letter to Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said the whistleblower findings exposed a “large scale fraud.”
“Antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real,” Rep. Jamie Raskin wrote.
“But your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature. Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications.”
A Department of Justice spokesperson told MS NOW, “While at the DOJ, Ms. Haley Van Erem did not work on university investigations. And for all matters, the Department stands behind the integrity of these investigations.”
The whistleblower complaint says the investigation was launched based on a single article in the New York Post that described antisemitic activities at medical school graduations.
“The article described protests that included protected expression such as students shouting ‘Free Palestine’ and students wearing Palestinian flags or keffiyehs,” the complaint says, adding: “It was not unheard of for news reporting coupled with additional evidence to lead the DOJ to initiate further scrutiny of potential statutory violations, but opening an investigation based on a single article was highly unusual.”
The complaint said that after being informed that there was no evidence to support a finding of a Title VI violation based on antisemitism at Brown, a senior Trump administration official at HHS, Daniel Shieh, agreed that there was “not a Title VI violation,” but told Van Erem and other DOJ team members at the meeting that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared.”
He pushed instead to obtain a settlement from Brown, and that ultimately happened.
The whistleblower complaint also accused Trump officials of telling investigators to interview Middle East studies professors, particularly focusing on Muslims, noting that one such interview of a Muslim professor was not to “get information,” but instead to see “what he will say.”
Raskin called that “a craven willingness to racially and ethnically profile faculty members while ostensibly investigating racial and ethnic discrimination.”
HHS did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
According to her complaint, Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025, “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.”
Her complaint asks for an investigation by the HHS inspector general, the DOJ inspector general and the Office of Special Counsel.
“The full extent of your misconduct remains unclear,” Raskin wrote to Dhillon. “At the very least, you have shown gross negligence in supervising the activities of your office. It is also a distinct possibility that you deliberately orchestrated a scheme to attack universities and their faculties and administrators while defrauding the American people and the courts.”
Court papers reveal that the Department of Homeland Security’s covert surveillance of anti-ICE groups is much darker than it first appeared. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America.
Samuel Corum/Getty Images
It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.
We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Timesreported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.
But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.
It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.
What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”
Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”
That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.
“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”
In other cases, undercover agents infiltrated these meetings only to find that the protesters turned out to be awfully innocuous. One agent covertly attended a meeting in February and found that it “was more of a panel discussion,” where there was “no discussion, or call for, violence toward law enforcement.”
Similarly, another agent’s report described infiltrating a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of organizers who said they sympathized with the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance. (The papers show that DHS’s surveillance reached into other states beyond Minnesota.) This agent reported initiating a conversation with a married churchgoing couple, and the woman told the agent she’d traveled to Uganda to assist “in the construction of a hospital.”
In short, we’re not exactly talking about the Weather Underground bombers here.
Indeed, as Substacker Brian Kaylor notes, a number of these undercover operations were even conducted in churches where protesters had organized. Several of the pastors were kept entirely in the dark about law enforcement’s infiltration of their houses of worship.
The absurdity of all this is overwhelming. In some cases, the Keystone Kops vibe is strong: One agent attended a May meeting in Minneapolis, only to report that his “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium.” The agent left without the device and had to return later to retrieve it.
Interestingly, the investigative reports also offer a glimpse of culture clashes between protesters and the agents who spied on them. One agent attended a Minneapolis meeting in February and reported, perhaps with distaste, on a female protester “with they/them pronouns” and “bright green short hair” and a “nose ring.”
As writer John Ganz hasnoted, Trump’s secret police force is made up of the MAGA “demimonde” and the “Trumpenproletarian mob.” And indeed, Trump’s political project has long been all about turning loose “his” people—law enforcement, biker gangs, coal miners, Ultimate Fighting enthusiasts—against the leftist enemy that inhabits blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment targets MAGA-adjacent UFC fanbases and people who show an interest in paramilitary tactical equipment or military recruitment. ICE messaging openly glorifies military-style operations in urban areas—that is, in blue America’s diverse, cosmopolitan strongholds. Trump talks about Minneapolis as akin to an enemy country populated with undesirables who must be purged by MAGA patriots.
Now we’re learning that this war on blue America also includes extensive undercover surveillance. Many of these agents appear to have been drawn largely from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that’s supposed to be focused on serious, complex, transnational crimes. They’ve now been reduced to standing around in parking lots writing down protesters’ license plate numbers and using sleazy deception tactics to spy on fellow Americans whose only crime is sympathy with immigrants.
Violence is precisely what spawned this undercover spying operation, but the real culprit was the violence of the government, not of the protesters. As Lisa Needham writes at Public Notice, we shouldn’t lose sight of how quickly ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis devolved into lethal state violence against Americans. It was just after ICE’s arrival in the city that an agent gunned down Renee Good in her car, with Pretti’s killing by federal agents following around two weeks later.
The outpouring of public protest in the face of this invasion apparently helped prompt DHS to launch its massive undercover surveillance operation directed at Americans, on the theory that the protests were being organized by larger, more sinister forces. The government dubbed this “Operation Puppet Master.”
But it’s unclear what all this surreptitious spying is even turning up. The Timesnotes that none of the groups targeted by it have been charged. And while the surveillance supposedly helped produce that aforementioned indictment of a handful of protesters, in reality the spying has swept far, far beyond those targets. The main result has been a discovery process that has now exposed the depth and breadth of the government’s massive spying operation for all to see.
There’s one other big unknown here. The document declaring the opening of Operation Puppet Master contains another vague reference: It says this effort has also been sanctioned under something called “Operation Keyhole.” Yet it’s unclear what this even is. As Kevin Riach, the lawyer, told me: “This suggests there’s some broader surveillance operation underway that we have yet to learn about.”
When I asked DHS what the phrase “Operation Keyhole” describes, the agency declined to comment.
Trump’s mass deportations have become akin to a Forever War. The expansion of ICE has poured tens of billions of dollars into the growth of Trump’s very own paramilitary army. This has included the stockpiling of enormous amounts of heavy military-style tactical equipment and weaponry, furnished by private contractors who resemble war profiteers.
And so, just as we saw under George W. Bush’s Forever Wars, we’re witnessing the growth of a massive public-private bureaucracy that’s metastasizing in unnerving new directions. It now appears to entail extensive domestic surveillance operations as well. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of it all. As always seems to happen with Forever Wars, we may never even learn all that much about many of the darkest atrocities perpetrated in its name.
If you have read the recent comments you will notice they have dealt with self-improvement and taking control over ones life. I strongly believe this. I know it can be done because I did it. I had a choice. I could be like my abusers and be what they wanted to make me. Or I could make sure I was never like them in anyway. I chose the second one. I think I made the correct choice. I prefer to help others than hurt them; I don’t need to harm others to make myself feel better. I like being kind and nice. I like lifting others up even if it is just with a hello and a smile. I treat the people I meet in my life as the humans they are with feelings and needs, not just objects to my own goals. Yes, I think I made the right choice. Hugs
This broadcast has important information on the trans issue being pushed by bigots in women’s sports. They discuss how this really is an attack on the rights of all women making them inferior to men in our society. It is part of project 2025 to lower the rights of women using trans people. Hugs
(Illustration by Salon / Getty Images / John Moore / Nikos Frazier / Omaha World-Herald / Compliant Technologies Manual)
Since Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security in March, Immigration and Custom Enforcement has dialed back on the trolling. Gone are the videos and memes, posted regularly under the leadership of Mullin’s predecessor Kristi Noem, that mocked detainees for crying and celebrated ICE agents for being recklessly violent. There have been no more showy “invasions” of cities like Minneapolis or Los Angeles, as Mullin has aimed to draw less attention to ICE’s incompetent and legally dubious methods. His strategy has largely worked in getting the unpopular agency’s name out of the headlines.
But that doesn’t mean ICE has given up on fulfilling Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s cruel fantasies. The xenophobic Miller agenda is still being treated as the vanguard in White House efforts to will an authoritarian police state into being, circumventing both law and tradition to attack due process and inflict fear on the nation’s immigrant population. In early August, DHS posted a notice that they plan to buy $20 million worth of electrified shock gloves that are euphemistically described as “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices.” The gloves are truly Orwellian, cheered on by police because they inflict pain but leave “no burn marks or scars,” making it easier for law enforcement to hide the abuse and cruelty they inflict. Amnesty International opposes the use of these devices, arguing they are “readily misused for torture.”
Trump, of course, has fantasized aloud about unleashing state violence on Americans, regardless of the laws against it. The gloves provide an avenue to hurt both immigrants and protesters, while avoiding due process and legal accountability.
The gloves’ torturous potential seems the biggest part of their appeal to the administration. Mullin has previously defended the killing of nonviolent anti-ICE protesters, while Miller regularly paints progressive protesters and immigrants as apocalyptic threats that need be countered with violence. Trump, of course, has fantasized aloud about unleashing state violence on Americans, regardless of the laws against it. The gloves provide an avenue to hurt both immigrants and protesters, while avoiding due process and legal accountability.
As the courts keeps getting in the way of Trump’s desire to persecute people he doesn’t like, the pressure to find a way to cheat the laws guarding human rights is only intensifying. Liz Dye, legal analyst and host of the “Law and Chaos” podcast, told me that “U.S. Attorneys are being pressured to bring politically motivated cases based on shoddy or even fabricated evidence, with the predictable result that the cases implode on impact with the court system, sometimes spectacularly.”
The most recent high-profile example is the attempt by U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro to prosecute David Hearn, a former Olympian who was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. As it turned out, Hearn was being used as a scapegoat to hide Trump’s embarrassment over ruining the pool by hiring poorly qualified cronies to renovate it. Pirro eventually had to admit that the case was without merit and dropped it, even though doing so meant a well publicized dressing-down from Trump at the White House.
In a recent column for the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie observed that “The principal aim of President Trump’s second term is revenge.” Worse, most everyone Trump fixates on is innocent of wrongdoing. Their only “transgression” has been upholding the law, criticizing the president or, in many cases, simply being of a race or class of people he doesn’t like. But Trump, Bouie argued memorably, also wants revenge on the American people “for rejecting him in 2020 and dealing a grievous blow to his ego.”
As Dye explained, Trump’s efforts to use the Justice Department to exact revenge have only backfired. It has “hemorrhaged staff” because honest attorneys have rejected pressure to “drop meritorious prosecutions” so they can “bring garbage political cases” instead. The department’s reputation is in tatters. Zahid Quraishi, a federal judge in New Jersey, said it best. When throwing a federal prosecutor out of his courtroom earlier this year, Quraishi said, “Generations of Assistant U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year.”
The new ICE gloves are part of this systemic destruction, representing the pathetic means the Trump administration will use, all so they can inflict maximum punishment before the judicial system lets their targets go. The immigration system is far easier to manipulate for authoritarian purposes than the federal justice system. Undocumented residents don’t enjoy the same legal rights as citizens, and deporting someone is a much lower lift, legally speaking, than prosecuting someone for a crime they didn’t commit. And yet, as POLITICO reported this week, the administration is losing most of its deportation cases in court. Of the 20,500 tracked by the media outlet, the White House lost at least 17,600, or 85% of the time.
Unable to win in court, Trump and his officials are looking to turn the process itself into the punishment. Immigrants are held in detention camps for months, often under torturous conditions, while waiting for their cases heard. ICE raids are frequent and often violent, sometimes targeting people who have legal paperwork to be in U.S. The result is that immigrants are being kept in a constant state of psychological terror, especially with the knowledge that having legal status — or even citizenship — may not provide sufficient protection. These electric gloves are just the latest part of what amounts to a torture campaign being waged by the administration — a way for ICE to hurt and punish immigrants and their defenders under the guise of “crowd control” or “de-escalation.”
While the situation is dire, it’s also a sign that Trump is weak. This is evident in the special grand jury Pirro recently convened in Washington following rumors that her job was at stake due to her inability to successfully prosecute a series of fall guys the presidents wants to blame for his own failures. But it’s doubtful she will be able to improve on her losing record. Since Trump can’t imprison people at the scale he wants, he has to settle for harassing them instead. That’s not the behavior of the all-powerful leader he was trying to be a year ago. They are the actions of a spoiled brat trying, and failing, to cover up the stench of losing.
This woman is a good person. She goes to church there or four times a week. She volunteers 4 days in the church thrift stores. She is not a bad person; she really is very nice, not just bright. So one day I was working on her computers, and it was something I needed to do about 3 times each month.
As I was working on her two computers, she kept telling me about her god’s love. Until I exploded!
Where was your god every time I was repeatedly raped as a kid, and why did he not stop it? Did he enjoy watching it? I admitted shouting.
She was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, Scottie, he was holding your hands. Really, I know the guys holding my hands. I knew the girls who were holding my head to force me down on their sex organs. I nearly walked out of the house. That level of stupidity is stunning, that level of excusing the abuse I had as a kid, to give her god credit.
I did finish the job. I also asked her if she wanted me to work on her stuff she kept her god herself. For the last 10 years that has been the truce we have. She still thinks her god is the entirety of existence, and she doesn’t seem to understand that her god watched each of my rapes, the violent rapes, the forced to drink urine, the tied to a stair rails so I could be raped by teenage males. Damn I have to get some relief. I think soon my head will explode. Maybe it should. I am tired. Maybe …maybe. No, not yet, not now. I promised Randy I would tell him before I did. Not yet, not now. But ever closer.
I just don’t understand why a good god would have watched what happened to me and let it go on, no matter what about free will. What about my free will not to be raped or forced to give blowjobs? Doesn’t that count to her god? Hugs
Scottie's Playtime 