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https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/22/the-shakedown-trumps-doj-pressured-lawyers-to-find-evidence-that-ucla-had-illegally-tolerated-antisemitism/>
"On the morning of Thursday, July 31, 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 quickly 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 most 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 $1 billion in
fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for
overhauling higher education.
In the months since Milliken’s aborted golf game, much has been written about
the Trump administration’s efforts to impose its will on UCLA, part of the
nation’s largest and most prestigious public university system. But an
investigation by
ProPublica and
The Chronicle of Higher Education, based on
previously unreported documents and interviews with dozens of people involved,
reveals the extent to which the government violated legal and procedural norms
to gin up its case 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 2024. But even
that case was weak, the lawyers acknowledged in a previously unreported
internal memo we obtained. It documented the extensive steps UCLA had already
taken to address antisemitism, many resulting from a Biden administration
investigation 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
told us they were relieved they’d left the DOJ before they could be asked to
sign it."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
