The Trump administration’s investigations into antisemitism at three elite universities were driven by premeditated political goals and violated federal law, according to an account by a former Justice Department attorney.
The testimony of the whistleblower, Haley Van Erem, is now being used as evidence in an investigation, led by Jewish U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, into what the Democrat from Maryland said was the federal government’s “fake” and “pre-baked frame-up” handling of campus antisemitism cases.
Van Erem, a former civil rights attorney, alleged in a disclosure provided to Congress Monday that in high-profile antisemitism investigations at Harvard, Brown and Columbia, the “outcomes of the investigations were predetermined, without regard to the evidence.”
The Trump administration had investigated all three Ivy League schools for alleged Title VI civil rights violations, ultimately striking deals with two of them to drop the charges. The disclosure concerns investigations conducted as part of the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, led by Justice Department official Leo Terrell.
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,” according to the complaint.
When reached for comment about the disclosure by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, a DOJ 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.”
The disclosure alleges that officials rushed investigations, disregarded concerns from career attorneys and pursued funding cuts and settlements with the schools before establishing that they had violated federal civil rights law.
In all three cases, which were investigated by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s civil rights office, the Trump administration pulled combined billions in federal grants to the schools after determining they had fostered antisemitic environments on campus.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars were suspended from these universities prior to the completion of Title VI investigations and the investigative team’s conclusions were frequently disregarded,” the complaint says.
The complaint alleges that, at Columbia, officials moved forward with allegations of discrimination and funding cuts before completing a thorough review, at one point giving attorneys only hours to review draft findings. At Harvard, Van Erem also alleged that the Trump administration had pursued sweeping funding freezes “before any completed investigation had established Title VI violations.”
At Brown, Van Erem claimed that investigators found insufficient evidence to conclude that the university had violated Title VI, but said that administration officials refused to close the investigation. After reporting the lack of findings to Daniel Shieh, a senior Trump administration official in the department, Shieh allegedly admitted that there was “not a Title VI violation” at Brown but said that “there’s no way we’re going to get a letter of no violation cleared” by higher-ups.
“The Task Force’s investigations into alleged antisemitism on university campuses were marked by extraordinary procedural irregularities, predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support, and disregard for Title VI’s legal requirements and the First Amendment to meet the political mission of the Task Force,” the complaint reads.
The complaint alleges that the Trump administration violated the procedural safeguards of Title VI, adding that “the agency’s own attorneys acknowledged that they lacked complaints, findings, or evidence to justify the funding suspensions.”
The allegations come days after a federal judge threw out the Trump administration’s antisemitism lawsuit against Harvard, citing a lack of evidence that the school had “turned a blind eye” to Jewish and Israeli students. The legal battle, which ensued after Harvard refused to settle its antisemitism claims with the administration, had divided Jewish groups.
Last year, the Trump administration reached a $220 million settlement with Columbia over allegations of antisemitism on the school’s campus, and Brown agreed to pay $50 million to state workforce development efforts in Rhode Island as part of its settlement.
The disclosure by Van Erem prompted Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, to demand in a letter Tuesday that Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sit for an interview with the committee and turn over records related to the investigation into the three schools, as well as Cornell.
“Antisemitism at American universities and medical schools is real. It needs to be addressed seriously. But your ‘investigation’ into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature,” Raskin wrote in the letter.
“Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, 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,” Raskin continued.
This was not the first time former Trump officials have alleged improprieties in the administration’s campus antisemitism probes. Last year, nine federal prosecutors resigned from the Justice Department after alleging a “sham” investigation against the University of California system.
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