A former Justice Department lawyer says the Ivy League school was forced to settle despite a lack of evidence.
Published August 18, 2026
A whistleblower claims that President Donald Trump’s administration’s findings that three of the nation’s most prestigious academic institutions violated civil rights laws by condoning anti-Semitism were “predetermined” as part of a “politically mandated initiative” that ignored standard investigative procedures.
The government is currently pushing back, contesting the whistleblower’s involvement in the investigation.
Recommended stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
A Department of Justice (DOJ) spokesperson told Al Jazeera that former Justice Department attorney Haley Van Elem, whose lawyers filed the complaint, “did not work on the university investigation” while at the department.
Mr. Van Elem filed a complaint with the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General and Special Counsel. The civil rights lawyer worked in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for nearly a decade before being involuntarily appointed to assist the special committee last year, according to disclosures. She ultimately resigned from her position at the Department of Justice in May 2025 because she “did not want to become vulnerable by further participating in politically motivated investigations that are unsupported by the facts and contrary to the law,” according to the complaint. It also accuses the special committee of targeting Muslim professors.
The complaint, obtained and reported by the Associated Press, also alleges that President Trump’s Unified Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism sought a multimillion-dollar settlement with the Ivy League university despite a government investigation that failed to establish any legal wrongdoing by the university. The exposé described political appointees dismissing career investigators and targeting professors based on religion and ethnicity.
Lawyers for the former government lawyer called for an oversight investigation into their client’s allegations, saying in a written statement that the multi-agency task force’s work amounted to “extraordinary procedural irregularities, a premeditated outcome without any factual or legal support,” and a disregard for the law and the Constitution.
The task force, launched by the Justice Department under then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in February 2025, was created by President Trump under an executive order to stamp out what the administration described as “massive anti-Semitic harassment in schools and college campuses” in response to protests at educational institutions across the country amid Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.
The suit alleges that the Ivy League school’s investigation was conducted to enforce a politically motivated strike agreement, and that the outcome of the investigation was predetermined to extract money from the school through settlement demands and frozen funds in the name of eradicating anti-Semitism.
A Justice Department spokesperson said: “We stand by the integrity of these investigations.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, has launched an investigation into explosive whistleblower allegations that Trump administration political appointees “grossly manipulated” federal anti-Semitism investigations to target certain U.S. universities, punish protected speech, and force schools into settlements, even though government investigators have not found sufficient evidence to verify Title VI violations.
“Since the start of the Trump administration’s ferocious attacks on universities, it has been clear that its investigations are designed to harass and intimidate rather than protect anyone from discrimination,” Raskin said in a press release Tuesday.
“Your ‘investigation’ into anti-Semitism was a fabrication, a pre-arranged hoax that was thoroughly political in nature,” Raskin wrote in a separate letter to Harmeet Dhillon, who was the public face of the department’s efforts to combat anti-Semitism as assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department.
Raskin had not responded to Al Jazeera’s request for comment at the time of writing.
Both Mr. Brown and Mr. Columbia settled with the administration. Columbia University agreed to pay $200 million over three years, and Brown University agreed to spend $50 million on workforce development in Rhode Island, even though the special committee did not formally acknowledge the university’s wrongdoing.
A federal judge last year ordered the Trump administration to reverse more than $2.6 billion in research funding cuts to Harvard University, saying the government “used anti-Semitism as a smokescreen for targeted, ideologically motivated attacks on this nation’s top universities.” Another judge last week dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that accused Harvard University of turning a blind eye to harassment of Jewish students.
