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former DOJ lawyers spill the tea
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...e=articleShareThe prime example I saw was the investigation into the U.C. school system about allegations of antisemitism on campus. In March, Andrea Lucas, who Trump appointed to be acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, filed what’s called a Commissioner’s Charge, which is essentially a complaint of employment discrimination. It was my section’s job to investigate it. We were told: “You have 30 days to do an investigation and give us a Justification Memo” — which is what we write after we conclude there is a legal violation.
Multiple teams of attorneys went to Berkeley, U.C.L.A., U.C. Davis and U.C.S.F. Mostly they didn’t find sufficient evidence to bring suit. The teams were so scared that in real time, every day, they were summarizing and reporting up to office management, back to Michael Gates, the deputy assistant attorney general, to create a paper trail for how they were not finding evidence.
Julia Quinn, Civil Rights Division: Leo Terrell, who ran the antisemitism task force, sells merch, and one of the very few people in our office who stayed behind, who got in with the administration, bought a hat, one of his “Leo 2.0” hats. He had it in the background of a Zoom.
Protesters at U.C.L.A. in March after the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University. Daniel Cole/Reuters
Ejaz Baluch: The only school, it became clear, where there might be a violation was U.C.L.A. One colleague said, “We have to feed something to the wolves.” The team concluded that the complaint process at the school was broken. Some professors we interviewed really did suffer on campus. They were harassed by groups of students.
But the D.O.J. demand letter to U.C.L.A. asked for $1 billion in damages. We thought, $1 billion? They are making that up out of thin air. There is no way the damages we found added up to anything like that amount.
