WASHINGTON — A Trump administration task force created to combat antisemitism pushed for settlements with Ivy League universities despite government investigations that were rushed and incomplete or that failed to establish legal violations by the schools, a former Justice Department lawyer alleged in a whistleblower disclosure obtained by The Associated Press.
The complaint alleges that the investigations into some of the country’s most prestigious academic institutions were designed to strong-arm the schools into cutting deals for political purposes. Outcomes of the investigations were “predetermined, without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to extract money from schools through settlement demands and funding freezes under the pretext of rooting out antisemitism, the complaint alleges.
The work of the multiagency task force, launched by the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in February 2025, was “marked by extraordinary procedural irregularities, predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support” and disregard for the law and Constitution, lawyers for the former government attorney wrote in seeking watchdog investigations into their client’s complaints.
The complaint taps into a broader public discussion about the administration’s efforts to confront allegations of antisemitism at colleges, a problem that received renewed attention during campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza that some Jewish students said made them feel unsafe. President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a goal of rooting out antisemitism that he said had gone unchecked during the Biden administration, but critics have called his government’s response heavy-handed and said it infringed on free speech rights and coerced concessions from public institutions.
A key House Democrat is publicizing the whistleblower’s allegations
Lawyers for the former Justice Department attorney, identified as Haley Van Erem, filed the disclosure with the inspectors general at the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, as well as with the Office of Special Counsel.
Van Erem spent nearly a decade working in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division before being involuntarily assigned to HHS to work on the Title VI investigations into the universities, the complaint says.
The health department assignees were initially told to scrutinize allegations of antisemitism at medical school commencement ceremonies — the lawyers were advised of a New York Post story describing antisemitic conduct at graduation events, the complaint says — but the inquiries were later expanded to focus on the entire schools in the cases of Columbia and Brown, according to Van Erem’s account.
Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025 because she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law,” says the complaint, which also says “officials targeted some Middle East Studies faculty for the content of their work and other professors for their Muslim faith.”
Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokesperson, said the department “stands behind the integrity” of its investigations. A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment Tuesday.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote separately to Harmeet Dhillon, who as the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been a public face of the department’s efforts to counter antisemitism. In his letter, he said antisemitism at colleges and medical schools is a real problem that needs to be investigated.
“But,” he told Dhillon, “your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature.”
Raskin wrote that “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.”
Scrutiny over the handling of investigations into elite schools
The whistleblower complaint deals chiefly with investigations into three Ivy League universities: Brown, Harvard and Columbia.
It alleges that in the case of Brown, the investigative team did not find evidence to support a violation of Title VI, the section of the Civil Rights Act that bars discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in programs that receive federal funding, but that “leadership refused to permit a notice of no violation and instead sought some form of settlement or resolution despite acknowledging the absence of a legal basis for doing so.”
Investigators did find evidence of discrimination at Columbia, the complaint says, but the investigation was done on an accelerated timetable before “adequate factual development and legal review were completed” and relied on allegations that “were unsupported, based on news reports or litigation filings, or that implicated protected First Amendment activity.”
Columbia University agreed to pay the government $200 million as part of an agreement restoring access to federal funding. Brown University separately agreed to pay $50 million to Rhode Island workforce development organizations to end the three federal investigations involving allegations of antisemitism and racial bias in admissions, with no findings of wrongdoing.
In the investigation into Harvard, Trump administration officials discussed “extraordinary funding freezes and sweeping proposed settlement terms” before an investigation had been completed that could establish Title VI violations. Sean Keveney, then-HHS acting general counsel, said he believed Harvard would settle because they were “over a barrel,” according to the complaint.
A federal judge last year ordered the Trump administration to reverse its cuts of more than $2.6 billion in research funding for the university, saying the government “used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” And a different judge last week dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard University of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students.
