Shakedown: Trump DOJ pressured lawyers to “find” evidence that UCLA illegally tolerated antisemitism

On the morning of Thursday July James B Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system but his new office was on the line with disturbing news The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California Los Angeles UC s biggest campus Milliken rapidly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California He landed on the front lines of one of the the greater part confounding cultural battles waged by the Trump administration The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration s broader campaign against elite universities which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and woke indoctrination Over the next four months the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits demanding more than billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher mentoring In the months since Milliken s aborted golf challenge much has been written about the Trump administration s efforts to impose its will on UCLA part of the nation s largest and the bulk prestigious society university system But an study by ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Training based on previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved reveals the extent to which the leadership violated legal and procedural norms to gin up its scenario against the school It also surfaced something equally alarming How the UC system s deep dependence on federal money inhibited its willingness to resist the legally shaky onslaught a vulnerability the Trump administration s tactics brought into sharp focus According to former DOJ insiders agency political appointees dispatched teams of career civil rights lawyers to California in March pressuring them to rapidly find evidence backing a preordained conclusion that the UC system and four of its campuses had illegally tolerated antisemitism which would violate federal civil rights statutes The career attorneys eventually recommended a lawsuit against only UCLA which had been rocked by pro-Palestinian protests in the spring of But even that matter was weak the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported internal memo we obtained It documented the extensive initiatives UCLA had already taken to address antisemitism countless resulting from a Biden administration examination based on the same incidents The memo also noted there was no evidence that the harassing behavior that peaked during the protests was still happening Nonetheless investigators sketched out a convoluted legal strategy to justify a new civil rights complaint against UCLA that several former DOJ lawyers called problematic and ethically dubious Multiple attorneys who worked on it informed us they were relieved they d left the DOJ before they could be petitioned to sign it UCLA seemingly had every reason to push back aggressively Yet UC system leaders have resisted calls from faculty and labor groups to file suit fearing the numerous avenues the administration could retaliate against not only UCLA but the entire university system which relies on federal funds for a full one-third of its revenue The authorities has opened probes into all UC campuses including at least seven that target UC Berkeley alone Thankfully they ve only fucked with UCLA at this point explained one UC insider privy to the system s thinking To tell this story ProPublica and the Chronicle reviewed constituents and internal records and interviewed more than people including DOJ attorneys who worked on the California investigations UC executives and faculty former governing body administrators Jewish leaders and legal experts Specific sought not to be identified for fear the administration would retaliate or because they hadn t been authorized to discuss the conflict The Justice Department and its top officers did not respond to detailed questions and interview requests Over three decades leading population colleges Milliken a dapper onetime Wall Street lawyer who goes by JB has built a reputation as a pragmatist able to work with politicians of all stripes and approach the lifestyle wars In an interview he called the challenges facing the entirety of UC and UCLA in particular unparalleled in his career There s nothing like this time he revealed This is singular It s the toughest On Nov UC received a temporary reprieve In response to a complaint brought by the American Association of University Professors U S District Judge Rita F Lin issued a scathing opinion finding that the Trump administration s actions against UCLA had flouted legal requirements and ordered it to cease all coercive and retaliatory conduct against the UC system Lin had already ordered the release of UCLA s million in frozen grant funding But those orders are preliminary and subject to appeal and a great number of people at UC fear that more attacks are coming Even if this holds there will purely be another move from this administration revealed Anna Markowitz an associate professor of schooling at UCLA and a leader of the campus faculty association which is among the lawsuit s plaintiffs They have not made it a secret what they wish to do In interviews UCLA researchers described the damage the school has absorbed so far Even Jewish faculty members who endured antisemitism commented they are aghast at the way the executive has weaponized their complaints to justify cutting critical scientific research One of them is Ron Avi Astor a professor of social welfare and guidance whose description of his rehabilitation at the hands of pro-Palestinian protesters is a prominent part of the lawsuit President Donald Trump s DOJ recommended against UCLA But he is dismayed at the cuts to research funds These are things that save people s lives Why are we messing with that It s a tool that anyone who s a scholar would abhor he described us It looks like we re being used For Trump s Justice Department the University of California was a juicy target from the start With its campuses nearly students six diagnostic centers and three national labs UC is a crown jewel of a blue state one whose governor Gavin Newsom has become one of Trump s greater part prominent foes Its scientists have won Nobel Prizes including four this year alone But as a high-powered science hub it s deeply dependent on federal funding getting selected billion a year in research grants learner financial aid and reimbursements from establishment healthcare programs UC also has nothing like the endowment wealth of the Ivy League colleges including Columbia and Brown from which the Trump administration has extracted penalties in the tens or hundreds of millions Chosen of Trump s DOJ appointees arrived with UC already in their crosshairs Harmeet K Dhillon Trump s assistant attorney general for civil rights had sued UC representatives in on behalf of two conservative trainee groups alleging unfair healing of conservative speakers they desired to bring to the Berkeley campus UC settled the occurrence a year later agreeing to modify rules for speakers at Berkeley and pay in legal costs And Trump had named Leo Terrell the bombastic former Fox News commentator to a top DOJ civil rights post where he heads the president s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism A UCLA School of Law graduate Terrell had publicly declared in mid- that his alma mater was a national embarrassment over its handling of criminal antisemitic conduct Dhillon and Terrell didn t respond to requests for comment In early February just two weeks after Trump took office his new attorney general Pam Bondi issued a series of directives to the DOJ requiring zealous advocacy for Trump s executive orders attacks on all forms of illegal DEI and aggressive actions to combat antisemitism Civil rights actions and investigations involving race and sex discrimination historically the civil rights division s chief focus were largely abandoned On Feb Terrell s task force informed plans to visit U S campuses including UCLA and UC Berkeley that were alleged to have illegally failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members to assess whether remedial action is warranted But by then the new Justice leadership had already decided to investigate UC schools and already concluded that they were guilty In early March Terrell declared on Fox News that students and employees in the entire UC system were being harassed because of antisemitism The administration planned to sue bankrupt and take away every single federal dollar from such schools he revealed and the DOJ would file hate crime charges A company of about a dozen career DOJ lawyers had been assembled only days earlier to investigate the claims of antisemitism against UC employees Under the employment discrimination section of the Civil Rights Act the occurrence of ugly antisemitic incidents or violence involving professors or staff wasn t by itself enough to merit federal intervention The legal standard was whether the university had engaged in a pattern or practice of tolerating antisemitism Before Trump took office the civil rights division typically took more than a year to complete such a probe according to DOJ veterans Investigators would conduct interviews on campus review reams of documents for compliance with various statutes and assess such complex matters as when hateful speech is protected by the First Amendment Once a complaint was authorized the civil rights division would seek voluntary compliance in a process that was meant to find solutions not punish colleges In this circumstance the Justice Department s political appointees demanded that investigators wrap things up in far less time initially a single month Career supervisors say they notified their new bosses that they couldn t in one month produce a scenario that could stand up in court Still North and South teams of lawyers were dispatched for multiday trips to California to dig up facts and interview officers at UC Berkeley UC Davis UC San Francisco and UCLA We were notified what the outcome will be You have one month to find evidence to justify a lawsuit and draft a complaint against the UC system stated Ejaz Baluch a senior trial attorney in the civil rights division who worked on the examination before leaving the Justice Department in May The incredibly short timing of this assessment is just emblematic of the fact that the end goal was never to conduct a thorough unbiased review Jen Swedish who was the deputy chief of Justice s employment litigation section until May declared in an interview The end goal was to file a damn complaint or have something to threaten the university Trump s appointee as deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights was Michael Gates formerly the city attorney in Huntington Beach California who assumed the DOJ post vowing to help win this country back You guys have unveiled a hostile work circumstances right lawyers on the UC group recall him asking just three weeks into the examination He seemed upset we were spending so much time inspecting Dena Robinson a senior trial attorney recounted us He didn t know what the holdup was in getting back to them on which university could be sued In an email about six weeks in Gates suggested there was easily enough in the constituents record to bring a complaint against at least one of the UC campuses a notion that horrified the career lawyers Why did we even go out there if you d already made up your mind another member of the UC organization recalled thinking Gates who left the DOJ in November after just months declined an interview request and offered no comment on detailed questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle Lawyers on the organization say it soon became apparent that there wasn t nearly enough evidence to justify an employment discrimination incident against UC Davis UC Berkeley or UCSF much less the entire UC system Fearful for their jobs they agreed on a strategy to feed the beast as one attorney put it to focus on UCLA which had experienced the the majority troubling and publicly explosive episodes of antisemitism Like a great number of colleges across the country UCLA had seen a spike in antisemitism amid protests over Israel s military response in Gaza following the brutal Hamas attack of Oct The campus had experienced dozens of ugly incidents including swastikas spray-painted on buildings and graffiti reading Free Palestine Fuck Jews Muslim and Arab students and faculty also complained of harassment and that any speech critical of Israel was being branded as antisemitic Starting in late April hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters set up a barricaded encampment in the center of the campus Reluctant to summon outside law enforcement UCLA administrators allowed the encampment to remain for a week disrupting classes and blocking access to certain buildings Protesters berated and occasionally physically assaulted anyone who refused to disavow Zionism On the night of April masked counterprotesters armed with poles and pepper spray and shooting fireworks stormed the encampment triggering a three-hour melee before police were definitively brought in Dozens of people were injured It took until a m May for Los Angeles police and sheriff s deputies to empty the site Before Trump even took office however UCLA and the federal authorities had already taken action to combat antisemitism at the school The greater part significantly in the waning days of the Biden administration the UC system had reached a broad civil rights settlement with the Department of Tuition resolving investigations into trainee complaints that UC had tolerated both antisemitism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination at UCLA and on four other campuses The settlement required UC to conduct more thorough investigations of alleged harassment and to submit reports on each campus handling of discrimination complaints Regime monitoring was to continue until UC demonstrated compliance with all the terms of this agreement The Trump administration disregarded all that Even as the employee inspection was underway it launched a new study of the same aspirant complaints in early May On May on Fox News Terrell the head of the antisemitism task force once again spoke publicly as if the DOJ s antisemitism inquiries had already been concluded Expect massive lawsuits against the UC system he declared Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal establishment We are going to go after them where it hurts them financially At the time the lawyers working on the UC employment probe were still racing to complete their recommendation They were focused solely on UCLA having determined there wasn t adequate evidence to pursue cases at other campuses A large number of had distinctly mixed feelings even about bringing that development This was not something we would usually litigate one lawyer on the band commented in an interview But everyone understood the front office was demanding this By then greater part of the remaining members of the UC company amid a mass exodus from the civil rights division were set to leave DOJ at the end of May after accepting the Trump administration s deferred-resignation offer It was comforting to know we were not going to be the ones signing any complaint the lawyer commented In the -page recommendation memo the UC squad sent on May to Dhillon the assistant AG for civil rights the lawyers spelled out their concerns We purely do not have strong evidence that the types of harassing acts that happened through spring are ongoing typically a legal requirement for bringing a complaint the memo acknowledged Certain of the harassment complaints also involved protected First Amendment speech And because as has been frequently noted the study had been truncated to three months there hadn t even been time to review particular of the documents UC produced the memo declared To shore up anticipated weaknesses in the circumstance the memo suggested an peculiar hybrid complaint strategy that would rest partly on new accusations about the ineffectiveness of the university s complaint process which was ongoing and partly on three older faculty grievances One of the grievances cited was that of Astor the professor of social welfare who describes himself as both a Zionist and a pro-peace researcher His academic work much of which takes place in Israel involves studying means to help students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds peacefully coexist But after he signed an open letter from Jewish faculty criticizing specific pro-Palestinian protesters calls for violence they accused him in a widely circulated letter of their own of supporting genocide When he tried to enter the encampment to talk to students he advised us a masked protester petitioned whether he was a Zionist After he stated he supposed in Israel s right to exist he was blocked from entering or spanning through the central campus Astor was targeted again last November he announced when he and an Arab-Israeli researcher he d flown in from Hebrew University of Jerusalem tried to discuss their research on preventing school violence in class A bunch of students got up and manifested pictures of dead babies and chanted and didn t let us talk he recalled Later heckled on his way to his car he disclosed he felt threatened and depressed He lost more than pounds and was granted permission to work from home but his repeated discrimination complaints to administrators went nowhere Astor s complaints the employment-section attorneys concluded would endorsement their proposal for a lawsuit against UCLA Even so they warned that their situation might not hold up in court In the memo they recommended seeking a settlement before filing a complaint With that message delivered majority of the lawyers who had investigated the University of California departed the Justice Department On the morning of July two days before Milliken s interrupted golf battle the University of California resolved what it surely hoped was among the last of the headaches from the encampment debacle It disclosed a million settlement of an antisemitism lawsuit brought by three Jewish students and a faculty member who declared protesters blocked them from accessing the library and other campus buildings creating a Jew exclusion zone and that the university did nothing to help them UC agreed to an extensive list of new actions and a chunk of the money went to eight organizations that combat antisemitism and sponsorship the UCLA Jewish group The approaches the university had taken a joint message declared demonstrate real progress in the fight against antisemitism The Trump administration had a different view That afternoon it declared that it had sent UC a notice letter saying the Justice Department had identified UCLA s response to the encampment had been deliberately indifferent to a hostile milieu for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act Bondi warned in a press release that UCLA would pay a heavy price for this disgusting breach of civil rights The antisemitism finding had been reached less than three months after the assessment had begun The letter which acknowledged that it relied significantly on publicly available reports and information ignored all the previous actions meant to put the events of to rest The violations they described all predate the December agreement mentioned Catherine E Lhamon who oversaw the Office of Civil Rights at the Training Department under the Obama and Biden administrations They ve made no showing for why the agreement was defective or why anything else was needed to ensure compliance going forward The July letter ended with an invitation to negotiate a settlement but warned that the department was prepared to file a lawsuit if there was no reasonable certainty of reaching an agreement Instead the next day the Trump administration began freezing UCLA s research money from the National Institutes of Healthcare National Science Foundation and Defense Department The agencies cited the campus handling of antisemitism as well as illegal affirmative action and allowing transgender women in women s sports and bathrooms UCLA was one of at least nine universities to be hit with grant suspensions but the first constituents institution David Shackelford whose biological school lab develops personalized treatments for lung cancer noted his phone blew up when colleagues began receiving stop-spending orders Three NIH grants totaling million over five years had supported the lab s work These are experiments and animal models that take years to develop Shackelford noted It s not like you can go to your computer and click save and walk away He scrounged together stopgap university funding and outside donations to keep the operation running on fumes vowing to go down swinging Elle Rathbun is not sure she s up for the fight A -year-old sixth-year doctoral learner in neuroscience Rathbun was halfway through a three-year NIH grant to inquiry how brains recover from strokes when she got the news Her award was on the long list of suspended UCLA grants She located substitute funding for a few of her work but now has doubts about whether a career in academic science is worth the stress Like hundreds of her colleagues she d gone through a monthslong competitive process to win the grant only to have the Trump administration halt the taxpayer-funded research midstream a move she called incredibly disappointing and wildly wasteful A group of UCLA researchers filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the cuts and won two court orders largely restoring them But even after those victories the flow of new science grants had slowed to a trickle In a July email later introduced in court the National Science Foundation s acting chief science officer wrote that in addition to freezing existing grants he had been ordered to not make any further awards to UCLA In nearly pages of personal statements to the court specific faculty members reported they re censoring their speech and changing their courses to avoid topics that might trigger even more cuts to the university Amander Clark a professor who heads a reproductive sciences center no longer talks about the options her research on infertility and the effects of hormones on human bodies could help gay and transgender people I am afraid that because UC is in the spotlight years of work could be dismantled at the stroke of a pen she wrote In selecting Milliken as their new system president the UC regents had picked a veteran at managing large residents university systems with vastly different political climates ranging from the City University of New York which he ran from to early to the University of Texas system which he led from late until May At UT Milliken had championed a few progressive procedures including expanding free tuition and safeguarding tenure but he had also fast shut down the system s offices related to diversity equity and inclusion in response to a new Texas law He knows what is a winning hand and what is not noted Richard Benson who worked with Milliken as president of UT Dallas On Aug his first day on the job at UC s system office in Oakland Milliken issued a measured constituents declaration that addressed the deeply troubling UCLA grant cuts and affirmed the critical importance of UC s life-saving and life-changing research That same week the Justice Department days after Bondi s declaration blasting UCLA for antisemitism against students delivered a second notice letter declaring that UCLA had illegally tolerated antisemitism against its employees and threatening to bring the hybrid lawsuit that the DOJ s UC association had recommended in May Eager to turn up the pressure on UC political appointees at the Justice Department had planned to issue another press release assailing UCLA for the employee-related antisemitism findings according to former agency executives But Kacie Candela a well-regarded employment-section lawyer and the last survivor from the dozen who had worked on the administration s UC investigations warned that under federal law it would be a criminal misdemeanor to publicly disclose details involving Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charges before filing a lawsuit After a heated dispute her argument prevailed and the UCLA letter went unannounced She was terminated days later Candela who is pursuing legal action to challenge her firing declined to discuss the matter for this story DOJ representatives didn t respond to questions from ProPublica and the Chronicle about the episode After receiving the two DOJ antisemitism notice letters Milliken expeditiously affirmed UC s willingness to engage in dialogue with the administration But that did nothing to forestall the next blow two days later the Justice Department s billion settlement demand which also urged for plan changes in areas where there d been no findings of wrongdoing including admissions practices screening of foreign students and transgender students access to bathrooms Within hours of UC s receipt of the -page demand letter on Aug which the DOJ had marked confidential CNN The New York Times and Politico had all posted stories saying they d obtained a copy from undisclosed sources A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on whether the administration had leaked the letter which UC spent weeks battling in court to keep private All this was without precedent due process or clear legal justification civil rights experts noted Agreeing to the DOJ s demands the Aug letter stated would release UC from insists that it had violated laws banning discrimination against students employees and women and that its civil rights violations constituted fraud They were trying to overwhelm explained Swedish the former civil rights deputy section chief They were spraying the fire hose at the university Strangely Justice demanded another million for employees who d complained of antisemitism discrimination even though only a handful had filed such grievances with the EEOC and such awards are capped at Former U S Attorney Zachary A Cunha explained a doable rationale for such unprecedented financial demands is that under Trump the DOJ is experimenting with using the False States Act in civil rights cases This would permit triple damages and encourage complaints from whistleblowers who would share in any financial recovery It s hard to know where these large and somewhat arbitrary numbers are coming from Cunha stated of the administration s settlement demands But if there s a pattern that s emerged thus far it s that every tool in the toolbox is on the table Kenneth L Marcus an antisemitism watchdog and a former assistant secretary of teaching for civil rights under Trump acknowledged that the governing body has pursued eye-catching penalties with a speed that suggested normal civil rights enforcement and due-process procedures have not been utilized But Marcus insisted the response was appropriate because of the national situation of antisemitism When a situation is extraordinary and unprecedented he commented the response demands to be as well In media interviews agents in the Trump administration acknowledge that its whole-of-government attacks on universities seek to avoid normal slow-moving civil rights procedures by instead treating alleged discriminatory practices as contract disputes where the regime is free to summarily cut off funding and demand headline-grabbing seemingly arbitrary fines Having that dollar figure it in fact brings attention to the deals in strategies people might not otherwise pay attention former White House deputy May Mailman a key architect of the administration s higher tuition strategy narrated The New York Times This approach is flagrantly unlawful and incredibly dangerous declared Lhamon the former assistant coaching secretary who is now executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the UC Berkeley law school There s a long set of actions that are written into statute that must occur first before funds can be terminated Lhamon commented the Trump administration was operating like a mob boss That is not the federal leadership doing civil rights work she commented Milliken has discovered himself caught between the Trump administration s demands and those of his new constituency in California which vocally opposes any hint of capitulation Newsom who serves on the UC Board of Regents has threatened to sue the federal regime calling its demands extortion and vowing to fight like hell against any deal The advocates of direct legal combat include Erwin Chemerinsky dean of UC Berkeley s law school The university should have forthwith gone to court to challenge this because what was done was so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional he recounted ProPublica and the Chronicle I required the University of California to be Harvard in fighting back and filing suit I didn t want them to be Columbia and Brown in capitulating But Milliken backed by the UC regents resisted calls for confrontation wary of provoking retaliation against the nine other system campuses also under research The damage to date at UCLA is minor in comparison to the threat that looms Milliken noted in a mid-September report We are in uncharted waters So UC has pursued settlement discussions with the regime According to a person familiar with the matter it has retained William Levi who served in Trump s first administration as a special assistant to the president counselor to the attorney general and chief of staff at the Justice Department to lead the talks If UC s leaders have preached restraint its faculty has opted for open defiance In addition to the suit that prompted the federal judge Lin to restore UCLA s frozen research grants a complaint filed in September by the American Association of University Professors and other faculty groups challenged the legality of the Trump administration s entire assault on UC At a hearing on Nov the regime s lawyer acknowledged that the administration s hodgepodge of actions against the system hadn t followed established civil rights procedures but mentioned the administration had the right to direct funding based on the Trump administration s program priorities Lin didn t buy it A week later in an unusually sweeping preliminary injunction she barred all of the Trump administration s actual and threatened moves to punish UC including the billion payment demand The Trump administration s playbook she wrote citing comments by Terrell and others illegally used civil rights investigations and funding cuts as a way of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune Although Lin ordered the Trump administration to lift the ban on new research grants to UC approvals were slow to resume In citizens remarks before the Board of Regents on Nov Milliken disclosed that more than grants across the system remained suspended or terminated representing more than million in research activity on hold He and others at UC have expressed concerns that the system s pathway to new grants will be blocked In our interview Milliken defended how UC has responded to the Trump administration saying the university has held its ground on its governance mission and academic freedom We recognize the differing opinions on how UC should engage with the federal ruling body he mentioned Our efforts remain focused on solutions that keep UC strong for Californians and Americans The post Shakedown Trump DOJ pressured lawyers to find evidence that UCLA illegally tolerated 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