The Washington Post reports:

The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Tuesday.

The complaint — filed by Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who said she was involuntarily detailed to work on the probes last year — alleged that the outcomes of investigations into schools like Harvard, Brown and Columbia were “predetermined without regard to the evidence” in a “politically mandated effort” to suspend their government funding and grab headlines.

When career attorneys raised objections that the evidence did not support the administration’s position or the tactics it was pursuing, including targeting Muslim professors for interviews, they were overruled and ignored, she said.

“Ms. Van Erem and other DOJ assignees repeatedly warned that funding suspensions lacked legal basis and that evidence did not support findings of violations at Brown,” Van Erem’s attorneys wrote in the 25-page filing, adding, “In the cases of Columbia and Harvard, no complete investigation was conducted.”

Van Erem left the Justice Department in May 2025, her attorneys said, because she was “unwilling to be made vulnerable to further participation in politically motivated investigations unsupported by facts and contrary to law.” Her disclosures Tuesday could bolster concerns raised by critics that the administration’s self-proclaimed push to combat antisemitism on campus was in fact an effort to punish schools it deemed ideologically opposed to its agenda. [Continue reading…]