Harmeet Dhillon: Biden DOJ Had Struggle Sessions Like “Unhappy Hours” With Supervisors, They Had “Crying Sessions”
United States Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, a civil rights attorney, describes the outgoing Biden Department of Justice in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
TUCKER CARLSON: Just so evil, it makes you think like, maybe we just burn the system down and start again. Thank you. 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: Well, Tucker, first, I’ll say thank you for having me here. The Civil Rights Division is the sort of the the the color revolution wing of the Department of Justice, okay? You know, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat administration, there are career lawyers who are very focused on a particular agenda there. And so when I showed up or when I was when the president was elected, I should say there are over 400 attorneys in the Civil Rights Division. And about 200 staff, so a total of about 600 people. And, you know, Kristin Clark, my predecessor, anti-police, you now, open racist, you know got in trouble during her term for not being candid with the Senate during her confirmation hearings on some issues. And 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. The my predecessor in that job pretty much left it untouched. You know, he told me kind of like there were the career people there, if you wanted to get something done, they went to the US attorney’s offices. Well, you know, 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. And so 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 that 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, you know, 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, you know. So I was actually looking out for that when I came and 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. So there are 11 sections in civil rights, and I drafted memos for each of those 11 sections for the lawyers and telling them these are the statutes. So for example, Americans with Disabilities Act, this is a statute that we enforce or Title VII, anti-discrimination or some of the other federal civil rights statutes and then that’s the baseline. And then this is the president’s agenda. These are his executive orders that he’s put out there about anti-discrimination, about anti-DEI, about enforcing our laws equally, and that’s the job. You’re going to apply these statutes within the framework of anti-Discrimination even-handedly and without fear or favor. And this catalyzed hundreds of lawyers to quit. The Civil Rights Division, so. TUCKER CARLSON: Um, wait, they quit because you informed them of the law? HARMEET DHILLON: Yes. And the law and the priorities, their pet projects had changed. They weren’t going to be able to do those the way that they wanted. TUCKER CARLSON: So they thought that this part of the Department of Justice was just immune to democracy? It has been. Like the elections just had no bearing on this? HARMEET DHILLON: It has been. I mean, there were career lawyers there who were doing the same thing, no matter who’s a president. And so suddenly, their little fiefdom that had remained untouched, like Shangri-La, was suddenly having to be responsive to elections. And TUCKER CARLSON: So that’s the definition of the deep state, what you just described. It really is. Elections have no effect. It’s like, there’s no way to control these people. They act totally independently from the democratic system. I mean, that’s, that the problem right there. HARMEET DHILLON: Well, that’s what I found. And so, you know, in response to my memos, of course, they began leaking to the press. They began having unhappy hours, which they would invite supervisors, political supervisors to, to make their point that they were unhappy. We got the point. And they had crying sessions, struggle sessions, crying sessions in the DOJ. They cried? Oh, there was, there was open crying in the halls, crying, crying. Crying, yes. And then one of my colleagues described to me, it was the last day, a couple of weeks ago for some of them, they lined up in a phalanx and approached the elevator together and then they left the building together, you know, to show their solidarity for one another there as if they were persecuted. How old are these? High school students or adults? These are 30, 40, and 50-year-old career attorneys in the Department of Justice. TUCKER CARLSON: That’s pathetic. HARMEET DHILLON: It’s, it’s different. You know, I come from the private sector, as you know, over 30 years in the private sector or 18 years successfully running my own law firm and, um, you know, you get to work and, and you, you put things together and if it’s not working out, you change tax and you try something else, but there’s no, there’s not accountability. And so that, that really has been kind of an eye-opener of dealing with that culture. We’re trying to change it, there are people left behind and I actually don’t care what their politics are. They can have their views, I believe, in the First Amendment. The question is, are you willing to do the job under the job description as set out by this administration? After all, the DOJ is part of the executive branch, the president gets to pick the top people running it and he kind of gets to set the agenda.