Somebody close to Harmeet Dhillon had a PR firm email us a press release on Friday about the UVA Law alum slinking her way out of her job at the Justice Department and back into private practice.
Poor PR folks, having to make their money this way.
Dhillon is on the short list of most vile people on the planet with a UVA degree; their job as PR flacks is to try to make her look good.
“I am returning to my private practice to do what I have done my entire career, take on powerful institutions when they violate the law,” Dhillon said, per the release, in which she quotes herself promising to “take the fight against illegal DEI into corporate boardrooms and courtrooms, stand up for American workers and businesses facing ideological discrimination.”
“The First Amendment has been my passion for decades, and we are going to defend it aggressively,” Dhillon finished up there.
Ugh.
“Illegal DEI” – how about the political DEI that we saw on Tuesday night, with:
- Gina Hinojosa (Texas) elected as the first Latina governor.
- Deb Haaland (New Mexico) elected as the first Native American woman governor.
- Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota) is the first Native American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
- Michigan elected a Muslim doctor, Abdul El-Sayed, to the U.S. Senate.
- Chris Pappas (New Hampshire) is the first openly gay U.S. senator.
Before Tuesday night, only three states had ever elected a Black person governor; this week, five states elected Black governors – with Keisha Lance Bottoms (Georgia) the first Black woman elected governor, joining Byron Donalds (Florida), David Crowley (Wisconsin) and Aaron Ford (Nevada) as first-time governors, and Wes Moore (Maryland), who won re-election.
Funny thing here about Harmeet Dhillon – you could look at a woman with brown skin born in Chandigarh, India, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen at the age of 10, who would like to believe that she earned admission to Dartmouth for undergrad and UVA for law school, whether that’s true or not, as the MAGA version of a DEI hire, not that she would like that characterization any more than any of the people she uses that epithet to demean their accomplishments likes it when she does it to them.
Too bad for her on that.
Dhillon had to start her own law firm after years of schlepping around as a clerk and associate, and then it took years of slumming around in private practice before anybody in political circles would ever hear of her.
She would eventually get the attention of TrumpWorld with her work on suits challenging state restrictions put in place during COVID, which earned her a coveted spot on the legal team during the challenges to the 2020 election.
As the MAGAs had to sit out the next four years – turns out, the election wasn’t actually rigged – Dhillon kept her name in the headlines with a suit against a doctor filed by a trans teen who decided to detransition.
Gotta keep the lights on, amirite?
This all led to Dhillon unironically being named Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights job in the Justice Department.
Her highlights there:
- declining to open an investigation into the ICE officer who shot and killed Renee Good in Minnesota.
- filing lawsuits against 30 states and Washington, D.C., to obtain voter registration lists; federal judges dismissed 27 of those cases.
- siccing the DOJ on Major League Baseball to make sure baseball-playing homophobes have the right to post messages that they think reclaim the rainbow from the LGBTQ+ community on their little ballcaps
- helping the MAGAs on the University of Virginia Board of Visitors sack Jim Ryan as president.
- opening a “compliance review” to determine whether the College of William & Mary’s scholarships and student benefits “include racial criteria that violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin”
- initiating an investigation into George Mason University over its diversity employment program, which wasn’t all that effective, not enough, certainly, to merit review by the Trumpers
ICYMI: Harmeet Dhillon
- Jim Ryan tells all: ‘What did the Governor know, when did he know it?’
- UVA bends the knee on DEI to get the Trump Justice Department off its back
- Trump DOJ targets George Mason over its ineffective diversity program
- Ryan-killer Harmeet Dhillon leading Trump DOJ effort to gut Virginia assault weapons ban
- Trump DOJ now targeting William & Mary over disadvantages to White kids
- UVA Law alum in Trump DOJ takes aim at MLB over Pride Nights
The press release sent to us on Dhillon’s behalf tries to sell the idea that her departure from the Justice Department is not a function of Tuesday’s political blue wave – pointing to a Fox News report citing Dhillon herself as the source of a claim that she had told the now-sacked Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles three weeks ago that she’d planned to step down, and was asked to hang on until after the elections, and a Bloomberg Law report that pushes the timeline for her decision to quit all the way back to August.
If those are true, it wouldn’t rule out that Dhillon was either just ahead of the rest of the Trumpers in reading the tea leaves heading into Nov. 3 – that or, as we’ve been learning in the past couple of days, the Trumpers had known for months that Tuesday was going to be a bloodbath, and spent the summer and early fall girding themselves for what was to come.
It’s not all bad news here for the likes of Harmeet Dhillon, who will have no shortage of clients interested in filing frivolous, ultimately fruitless, tilting-at-windmills lawsuits.
The caveat for Dhillon and her like-minded: there’s no other side of the beatdown that the MAGAs suffered on Tuesday night.
MAGA is dead; where things go from here is resolution, then epilogue.
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Chris Graham
