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.”
Hellbound and Down 