{"id":166934,"date":"2026-11-06T15:26:06","date_gmt":"2026-11-06T23:26:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/11\/06\/harmeet-heads-for-the-hills\/"},"modified":"2026-11-06T15:26:06","modified_gmt":"2026-11-06T23:26:06","slug":"harmeet-heads-for-the-hills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/11\/06\/harmeet-heads-for-the-hills\/","title":{"rendered":"Harmeet Heads For The Hills"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Harmeet Dhillon is outta here. The head of the Justice Department\u2019s Civil Rights Division \u2014 or what remains of it \u2014 is taking her toys and going back to California. Turns out, it\u2019s more fun being a wrecker in the private sector. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like so many OG edgelords, Dhillon got her start at an Ivy League college in the 80s, where being conservative felt inconoclastic and cool, if you ignored the fact that you were spending your Friday nights with irredeemable dorks like Ted Cruz and Dinesh D\u2019Souza.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As editor of the <em>Dartmouth Review<\/em>, Dhillon <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1988\/11\/06\/us\/satire-by-dartmouth-publication-under-heavy-fire-as-anti-semitic.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">compared<\/a> the university\u2019s Jewish president to Hitler, complaining that the school\u2019s left-wing bias amounted to a \u201cFinal Solution to the Conservative Problem.\u201d To be fair, she had big shoes to fill as a successor to Laura Ingraham, who used the newsletter to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advocate.com\/media\/2018\/4\/06\/dartmouth-alum-recounts-laura-ingrahams-bullying-gay-students-college\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">out gay students<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lots of people say dumb shit as undergrads, but Dhillon has been spouting that nonsense for 35 years \u2014 and making a living off it, too. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She represented various \u201cvictims\u201d of cancel culture, including Ann Coulter and James Damore, the Google employee who threw a public tantrum because the company was too mean to white dudes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She filed a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/media\/harmeet-dhillon-antifa-lawsuit-andy-ngo-portland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">RICO trollsuit<\/a> against Antifa on behalf of right-wing shitstirrer Andy Ngo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She challenged mask mandates, to defend Americans\u2019 sacred right to breathe on each other during a pandemic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her clients included Tucker Carlson, Mike Flynn, and Sebastian Gorka.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And she represented the Trump campaign in multiple challenges to Biden\u2019s victory in 2020, gleefully flogging lies about rampant electoral fraud, albeit only on TV. Unlike Rudy Giuliani, she wasn\u2019t dumb enough to say that stuff in court.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this made her a star in MAGAworld \u2014 albeit, not enough of a star to knock Ronna Romney McDaniel off her perch as head of the RNC. (Only Trump could do that.) And when Trump came back to the White House, he \u2026 did not make her attorney general as she\u2019d hoped. Nor did he put her in line for leadership at DOJ, even after Emil Bove got installed at the Third Circuit and Pam Bondi was packed off back to Florida. Trump even dispatched Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward \u2014 whom Dhillon <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/31\/us\/politics\/harmeet-dhillon-doj-trump.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">publicly disdained<\/a> \u2014 for the administration\u2019s most batshit missions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Trump put Dhillon in charge of the Office of Civil Rights, which she energetically dismantled. It helped that 75 percent of the staff <a href=\"https:\/\/news.bloomberglaw.com\/us-law-week\/doj-fires-and-reassigns-civil-rights-lawyers-as-new-hires-arrive\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">noped out<\/a> when they saw her coming. Dhillon canceled consent decrees with police departments and discrimination enforcement actions. Instead she focused on harassing trans kids and bludgeoning universities with spurious claims of antisemitism as a means of extorting cash and resegregating higher education. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2026, she added a new priority: stealing state voter rolls to enable a federal takeover of elections. She sued 31 states and DC to force them to hand over sensitive voter data, basing her legal argument on a Jim Crow-era civil rights law designed to protect Black voters\u2019 access to the ballot. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The move was extremely on-brand! It was not, however, extremely effective. After getting slapped down by 29 courts and counting, Dhillon was reduced to sending menacing letters threatening to send state election officials to prison if they allowed supposed non-citizens to vote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Word of Dhillon\u2019s departure leaked just hours after Tuesday\u2019s blue tsunami. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI wasn\u2019t asked to resign,\u201d she <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/doj-civil-rights-chief-harmeet-dhillon-resigns-says-white-house-asked-her-wait-until-after-midterms\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">told<\/a> Fox News. \u201cI resigned three weeks ago, and Susie [Wiles] asked me to please wait until after the midterms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">CBS tells a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/harmeet-dhillon-resigns-doj-civil-rights-division\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">different story<\/a>, reporting that Trump demanded her ouster after an October 18 appearance on \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d where her lies about non-citizen voting were insufficiently aggressive for the president. The network says that she was kept in place until after the election for the sake of appearances.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whatever the reason, she\u2019s joining a hoard of DOJ lawyers turning in their badges before Democrats take back the gavel in both Houses of Congress and start raining down subpoenas. But we\u2019ve certainly not heard the last of Harmeet. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wherever there are little girls having to \u201cprove\u201d their gender to play U10 softball, <em>she\u2019ll be there<\/em>. Where there are gross incels excluded from the office happy hour because of that <em>unfortunate incident<\/em> in July, <em>she\u2019ll be there<\/em>. Whenever a white high school senior thinks he was passed over for admission to a selective program in favor of an undeserving brown kid, <em>Harmeet will be there<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh, and when those subpoenas drop, <em>she\u2019ll be there, too<\/em>. Can\u2019t retire your way out of that one!<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/lizdye.bsky.social\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Liz Dye<\/a>\u00a0produces the Law and Chaos\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawandchaospod.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Substack\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/law-and-chaos\/id1727769913\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<em><strong>You can subscribe by clicking the logo:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-resized\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawandchaospod.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" width=\"300\" height=\"153\" src=\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/06\/law-and-chaos-logo-liz-dye-300x153.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1163974\" title=\"\"><\/a><figcaption><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\n<p>The post <a href=\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/2026\/11\/harmeet-heads-for-the-hills\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Harmeet Heads For The Hills<\/a> appeared first on <a href=\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"post-single__featured-image post-single__featured-image--medium alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"200\" src=\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2026\/11\/harmeet-dhillon-GettyImages-2290392113-300x200.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium size-medium wp-post-image\" alt=\"\" title=\"\"><figcaption class=\"post-single__featured-image-caption\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHarmeet Dhillon (Photo by Al Drago\/Bloomberg via Getty Images)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Harmeet Dhillon is outta here. The head of the Justice Department\u2019s Civil Rights Division \u2014 or what remains of it \u2014 is taking her toys and going back to California. Turns out, it\u2019s more fun being a wrecker in the private sector. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Like so many OG edgelords, Dhillon got her start at an Ivy League college in the 80s, where being conservative felt inconoclastic and cool, if you ignored the fact that you were spending your Friday nights with irredeemable dorks like Ted Cruz and Dinesh D\u2019Souza.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As editor of the <em>Dartmouth Review<\/em>, Dhillon  the university\u2019s Jewish president to Hitler, complaining that the school\u2019s left-wing bias amounted to a \u201cFinal Solution to the Conservative Problem.\u201d To be fair, she had big shoes to fill as a successor to Laura Ingraham, who used the newsletter to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advocate.com\/media\/2018\/4\/06\/dartmouth-alum-recounts-laura-ingrahams-bullying-gay-students-college\" id=\"https:\/\/www.advocate.com\/media\/2018\/4\/06\/dartmouth-alum-recounts-laura-ingrahams-bullying-gay-students-college\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">out gay students<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Lots of people say dumb shit as undergrads, but Dhillon has been spouting that nonsense for 35 years \u2014 and making a living off it, too. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She represented various \u201cvictims\u201d of cancel culture, including Ann Coulter and James Damore, the Google employee who threw a public tantrum because the company was too mean to white dudes.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She filed a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/media\/harmeet-dhillon-antifa-lawsuit-andy-ngo-portland\" id=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/media\/harmeet-dhillon-antifa-lawsuit-andy-ngo-portland\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">RICO trollsuit<\/a> against Antifa on behalf of right-wing shitstirrer Andy Ngo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">She challenged mask mandates, to defend Americans\u2019 sacred right to breathe on each other during a pandemic.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her clients included Tucker Carlson, Mike Flynn, and Sebastian Gorka.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And she represented the Trump campaign in multiple challenges to Biden\u2019s victory in 2020, gleefully flogging lies about rampant electoral fraud, albeit only on TV. Unlike Rudy Giuliani, she wasn\u2019t dumb enough to say that stuff in court.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">All of this made her a star in MAGAworld \u2014 albeit, not enough of a star to knock Ronna Romney McDaniel off her perch as head of the RNC. (Only Trump could do that.) And when Trump came back to the White House, he \u2026 did not make her attorney general as she\u2019d hoped. Nor did he put her in line for leadership at DOJ, even after Emil Bove got installed at the Third Circuit and Pam Bondi was packed off back to Florida. Trump even dispatched Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward \u2014 whom Dhillon  \u2014 for the administration\u2019s most batshit missions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Trump put Dhillon in charge of the Office of Civil Rights, which she energetically dismantled. It helped that 75 percent of the staff <a href=\"https:\/\/news.bloomberglaw.com\/us-law-week\/doj-fires-and-reassigns-civil-rights-lawyers-as-new-hires-arrive\" id=\"https:\/\/news.bloomberglaw.com\/us-law-week\/doj-fires-and-reassigns-civil-rights-lawyers-as-new-hires-arrive\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">noped out<\/a> when they saw her coming. Dhillon canceled consent decrees with police departments and discrimination enforcement actions. Instead she focused on harassing trans kids and bludgeoning universities with spurious claims of antisemitism as a means of extorting cash and resegregating higher education. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2026, she added a new priority: stealing state voter rolls to enable a federal takeover of elections. She sued 31 states and DC to force them to hand over sensitive voter data, basing her legal argument on a Jim Crow-era civil rights law designed to protect Black voters\u2019 access to the ballot. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The move was extremely on-brand! It was not, however, extremely effective. After getting slapped down by 29 courts and counting, Dhillon was reduced to sending menacing letters threatening to send state election officials to prison if they allowed supposed non-citizens to vote.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Word of Dhillon\u2019s departure leaked just hours after Tuesday\u2019s blue tsunami. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI wasn\u2019t asked to resign,\u201d she <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/doj-civil-rights-chief-harmeet-dhillon-resigns-says-white-house-asked-her-wait-until-after-midterms\" id=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/doj-civil-rights-chief-harmeet-dhillon-resigns-says-white-house-asked-her-wait-until-after-midterms\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">told<\/a> Fox News. \u201cI resigned three weeks ago, and Susie [Wiles] asked me to please wait until after the midterms.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">CBS tells a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/harmeet-dhillon-resigns-doj-civil-rights-division\" id=\"https:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/harmeet-dhillon-resigns-doj-civil-rights-division\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">different story<\/a>, reporting that Trump demanded her ouster after an October 18 appearance on \u201c60 Minutes,\u201d where her lies about non-citizen voting were insufficiently aggressive for the president. The network says that she was kept in place until after the election for the sake of appearances.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whatever the reason, she\u2019s joining a hoard of DOJ lawyers turning in their badges before Democrats take back the gavel in both Houses of Congress and start raining down subpoenas. But we\u2019ve certainly not heard the last of Harmeet. <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wherever there are little girls having to \u201cprove\u201d their gender to play U10 softball, <em>she\u2019ll be there<\/em>. Where there are gross incels excluded from the office happy hour because of that <em>unfortunate incident<\/em> in July, <em>she\u2019ll be there<\/em>. Whenever a white high school senior thinks he was passed over for admission to a selective program in favor of an undeserving brown kid, <em>Harmeet will be there<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oh, and when those subpoenas drop, <em>she\u2019ll be there, too<\/em>. Can\u2019t retire your way out of that one!<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" \/>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/lizdye.bsky.social\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Liz Dye<\/a>\u00a0produces the Law and Chaos\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawandchaospod.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Substack\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/law-and-chaos\/id1727769913\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">podcast<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0<em><strong>You can subscribe by clicking the logo:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image is-resized\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawandchaospod.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"153\" src=\"https:\/\/abovethelaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2025\/06\/law-and-chaos-logo-liz-dye-300x153.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-1163974\" title=\"\"><\/a><figcaption><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harmeet Dhillon is outta here. The head of the Justice Department\u2019s Civil Rights Division \u2014 or what remains of it \u2014 is taking her toys and going back to California. Turns out, it\u2019s more fun being a wrecker in the private sector. Like so many OG edgelords, Dhillon got her start at an Ivy League [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":166887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}