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.”
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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.
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
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