DOJ, HHS Antisemitism Investigations Were Predetermined

Whistleblowers say the Justice and Health and Human Services Departments’ antisemitism investigations at Brown, Columbia and Harvard Universities last year were politically motivated probes that were predetermined and legally spurious.

The Trump administration cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding for those institutions, citing antisemitism allegations. Columbia settled with the Trump administration, agreeing to pay $221 million and give up significant autonomy, while Brown promised to put $50 million into Rhode Island workforce development efforts. Harvard sued the administration and has won in court, though it’s also made multiple changes on campus to address antisemitism allegations.

The Government Accountability Project sent a “protected whistleblower disclosure” letter on Monday to the U.S. special counsel, Justice and HHS inspectors general, and members of Congress on behalf of Haley Van Erem and other unnamed career Justice attorneys. The letter says these attorneys were temporarily assigned to the HHS Office for Civil Rights in March 2025 to work on Title VI investigations by the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Van Erem alleges she was abruptly removed from working on “five cases involving the Americans With Disabilities Act, including serving as lead counsel on active settlement enforcement in an ADA matter concerning services for children with mental health conditions.” Attorneys say they were given little time to prepare others to handle such cases. They also allege that the Title VI investigations were initially based on a single New York Post article alleging antisemitism at medical school graduation ceremonies.

The whistleblower letter claims that at an April 1, 2025, meeting, Sean Keveney, HHS’s acting general counsel, “announced the investigations’ goal was to force the schools into lawsuits that would lead to court-ordered injunctive relief requiring the schools to disgorge money received by HHS and force the universities to make up the lost grant and contract fees from their endowments.”

Van Erem said Daniel Shieh, the HHS Office for Civil Rights associate deputy director, said he expanded the investigation into universities beyond their medical schools in order to substantiate a Title VI violation finding. Van Erem also said in the disclosure that Keveney told her that “the White House had ordered HHS to pull hundreds of millions of dollars from Harvard, prompting Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to call the White House to explain the negotiations were in progress.”

At one point, “Keveney asserted that the DOJ attorneys’ jobs were not to provide legal advice or make legal determinations,” the letter said.

“Staff were encouraged to invert the standard sequence of investigation, compliance review, and legal analysis and instead work backward from desired settlement terms, including provisions not directly tied to substantiated Title VI anti‑harassment or antisemitism violations, to generate proposed findings that would support those terms,” the whistleblower complaint says. It calls for an investigation, including into alleged abuse of authority and fraudulent inducement.

HHS didn’t respond to a request for comment Tuesday. In an email to Inside Higher Ed, a Justice spokesperson said, “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.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the House Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat, said in a news release that he’s investigating. He’s demanding that Harmeet Dhillon, Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, appear before the committee.

“The full extent of your misconduct remains unclear,” Rankin said to Dhillon in the release. “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, their faculties, and their administrators for political purposes while defrauding the American people and the courts.”