Lawfare Daily: DOJ’s Very Online Civil Rights Head, with Quinta Jurecic and Anna Bower

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It was only, you know, several hours after this church service protest started going viral that we started to see Harmeet Dillon posting about it.

And eventually, the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, investigated this,

brought charges against, you know, over two dozen people who were involved in this protest at the church. It's the law fair podcast, I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Law Fair, with Quintedressic, a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Annabauer, a senior editor here at Law Fair.

“It seems to me that you should want DOJ to actually be putting in the time and the work to”

seriously investigate these cases in ways that will actually resolve the issues rather than this sort of slap dash, social media driven approach that maybe, you know, there's a lot of sound and fury that the end result may be very little. Today, we're talking about Quintedress's recent profile in the Atlantic of Harmeet Dillon, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department.

So Quinted, I want to start with you, there's no shortage of things happening in the world within your ambit, but you recently put a lot of time and effort into an amazing profile out on Harmeet Dillon out in the Atlantic, very recently, just days ago, at the time of recording. So why Harmeet Dillon, why did you choose to write about her?

Well, always good to be back on the love for a podcast.

“So Dillon, I think, is a really interesting figure because she has a very important job,”

the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, so she oversees the Civil Rights Division. That has always been, you know, a significant position in the Justice Department. You're in charge of really the lion's share of the government's civil rights enforcement. That can mean, you know, criminal prosecutions of civil rights violations, it can also mean investigations and civil enforcement. Traditionally, I think I would say,

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights have not really been a household name. Even though it is an important job, Dillon is really someone who has taken this role and her profile has really risen over the course of her time in this position. She posts a lot on X, the everything app she shows up a lot on conservative and right-wing media, television shows, you know, YouTube, live streams, that kind of thing.

She's really kind of making a name for herself. So there was this public profile that I thought would be interesting to kind of dig into and take a close look at. And then there's also just the matter of what she has done with the division. So Trump, you know, came into government very clearly saying that he wanted to use the Justice Department as kind of a tool of his his administration's agenda. He wanted to use it to go after the people he disliked

and because the civil rights division is so centrally located in a lot of issues that kind of have really been animating maga in terms of, you know, affirmative action, transgender rights,

“gender issues of disparities between how men and women are treated. I think this”

of our supervision was kind of at the center of the storm. And so what we've seen is that Dillon has reoriented the division's work into kind of what I've been thinking of as like the UNO reverse model of the civil rights division, sort of taking its work and orienting it from away from serving the sort of historically disadvantaged communities that it has traditionally focused on a more toward focusing on groups that we would not have put in that category. So, you know,

Christians, for example, white Americans men, but then she has also done this at the same time as she has driven out a significant proportion of the divisions workforce. So there's some statistics from Justice Connection, the organization that sort of networks current and former DOJ employees would suggest that at 1.75% of the attorneys who were at the division as of 2024 had left, evident because they were fired, they quit, they took the DOJ deferred resignation offer.

having trouble with that and we can talk about it. But that hollowing out of expertise and restaffing,

“I would argue along ideological lines, I think is a really important story not only for the civil”

rights division but also for what it says about, you know, how the Trump administration is refashioning DOJ in its own image in ways that really no previous administration has done and also what might the legacy of this be going forward? Yeah, that was really helpful. That was great overview of all the things I want to talk about, the staffing, the obviously the posts of our most online, perhaps civil rights division head in DOJ history, I think, safe to say. Absolutely. I know this

this Uno reverse as you call it, I want to also dig into what you think Harmy Dillon's

conception of civil rights is and how her upbringing led to that. But first Anna, I'm actually

“just really curious because I don't know the answer to this question of when Harmy Dillon”

appeared on your radar as someone who's watched the Justice Department for years was it during the first Trump administration, was it more recent? Yeah, when did you first hear the name Harmy Dillon? I mean, Harmy is definitely been on my radar for a while because of her firm and its representation, you know, after in the aftermath of the first Trump administration, Dillon's firm was representing a lot of conservatives and conservative causes that I was following

in the course of my work as a reporter. She has been a Trump world figure for a long time and had a substantial Twitter following and just lots of clout in that world for a long time before she was in her current government position. So she was on my radar, but it really wasn't until

she got into government during this second Trump administration that I started really obsessively

following her and her activities, her posting habits online. In part because there's a lot of things that you can learn about what the civil rights division might be doing or what it's interested in based on what Harmy Dillon is tweeting on a daily basis. Hi, they're intentionally, they were unintentionally, right? Exactly. They're viewed about what you saw hidden in a photo that she posted on X. Oh, right, right. So something like that, you know, there there was this example

that you've just alluded to in which Harmy Dillon posted a photo of herself signing a document and tried to hide the content of that document by like putting a separate piece of paper upside down on top of it, but actually if you zoom in and, you know, enhanced the image and kind of flipped it around computer enhanced. Yeah, exact computer enhanced. If you did all of that, you could very, very clearly see that it was a letter that was being sent to the the Ohio State University's

school medicine. And so from that, we were able to break a little bit of news that the civil rights division was looking into the Ohio State University. And so, you know, things like that, you can find out, so it's valuable from a journalistic perspective, but also just really fascinating and somewhat bewildering from the perspective of someone who's familiar with Justice Department norms because often you don't see people who work in the Justice Department talking to the extent

that Harmy Dillon does about ongoing investigations and arguably making, you know, very politicized statements that are not typically what you see, Justice Department officials making. So it was very interesting from that perspective. We can talk a little bit more about how, you know, their statements that she's made that has indeed found its way into cases. And so it's, it's just very interesting

“from for all those reasons and that's why I started following her. So Quinta, other than perhaps”

struggles with Opsac, which to be fair to the A.A.G. is not unique to her in this current administration, what are some of the other hallmarks of the Harmy Dillon civil rights division, most of which, most of what we are about to talk about, I assume, are a bit of a rupture from past practice to some continuation, what are the current activities of the civil rights division of the

what's a continuation and one thing that, you know, I spoke to, I think over a dozen current and former attorneys at the Civil Rights Division for this piece and one thing that a lot of them emphasizes, you know, look, priorities changed from administration to administration, right? Particularly the Civil Rights Division, which is kind of, again, at the center of a lot of politically sensitive issues that administration is of different parties might have different opinions on. So,

Democratic administrations tend to really double down and enforcing voter voting rights, you know, access to reproductive health care, Republican administrations tend to scale down that

“work and scale up enforcing religious freedom issues, right? I think, you know, a lot of us”

probably remember in the first Trump administration when Attorney General Jeff Sessions,

there's a name you haven't probably hadn't thought of for a while, uh, with Drew from a lot consent decrees that the Justice Department had reached with police departments around the country. But there's, there's kind of a range that people will move within and the back and forth within that range is totally expected attorneys who, you know, career attorneys who work at the department, you know, understand that or find what that. What we've seen now, one person described it

to me is like, you know, you have the highway barriers to keep you from going off the highway. Usually it's, you know, you go between the barriers and this is like we crash through the barrier, we've gone through the sound barrier and we're heading for the development.

Everything is just completely, of course, in a way that we've, we've never seen before.

“And so I think a really good example is one of the first things that Dylan did in her new position.”

She withdrew the Justice Department from a settlement that had been reached with Laundice County, Alabama, which is a poor predominantly black county that has long had trouble with sewage systems because of the, the consistency of the soil, it's in the black belt. And so a lot of people in the area end up having to use sort of DIY septic tank systems that don't work well and you end up with sewage bubbling up when it rains, which is obviously unsanitary and potentially really dangerous.

Dojo and her Biden had reached a settlement, an environmental justice settlement with Alabama with the county to move forward on helping residents, you know, install functioning sewage systems and Dylan terminated that and said that, you know, it was something that needed to be gotten rid of under Trump's executive order demanding that the administration

“stopped any activity relating to DIY. I think that, you know, Dylan didn't really explain”

in her public statement why helping of county and style functioning sewage system would constitute DEI, but that's kind of the mode that we're working in and one person who I talked to who had overseen the section of the civil rights division that had been implementing that settlement

said that she felt that this, this basically showed that the administration saw civil rights

itself as DEI. After that first shot across the bow, I suppose, of the settlement and I'm curious what you've observed during Harmeets 10 year, you know, Quinterrites about an interprofile about a flood of memos that came after that, you know, as Harmeet Dylan's intentions for this radical change of the civil rights division began to take shape, what were some of the things that you noticed? Yeah, so I mean, I'll mention a few of the things that I've been reporting on

that relate to Harmeets work at the civil rights division and some of the things that she seems to have taken are really close, kind of personal interest in. One of the things relates to a protest that occurred in Minnesota at a church and it involved protesters interrupting a church service and this went viral videos of this moment went viral on social media and, you know, as soon as something starts going viral and I see people on the right kind of clamoring for prosecutions, I almost immediately

wonder how long it's going to be until we see somebody within the Justice Department make some kind of statement about it. And sure enough, it was only, you know, several hours after this church service protest started going viral that we started to see Harmeet Dylan, you know, posting about it and eventually the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, you know, investigated this

church and the prosecution was is interesting because it's using the house of worship provisions

under the face act. Now, people might be most familiar with the face act because it is a statute that was enacted that has largely been used to prosecute people who try to blockade or make threats in relation to abortion clinics or crisis pregnancy centers. And there's a prong of that statute that relates specifically to those types of reproductive health care centers, but there's a separate prong of it that relates to people who, you know, try to interfere with or obstruct access to church

“services. It's been very, very, very prosecuted, actually, I think this prosecution is the first”

criminal prosecution under the House of Worship prong of the face act. Historically, it was kind of, you know, thought to be quite risky to prosecute people under those House of Worship provisions of the face act because of the constitutional basis for that particular provision was seen to be

a little bit shaky. Basically, the just of it is that it's not clear that there is a

commerce clause basis for Congress enacting that provision of the act. So instead what the Justice Department often did was prosecute people who attacked churches under a different provision of federal law. But if a harmeet has kind of taken up this face act statute as and the claimed weaponization around it, there's this claim that, you know, the Biden Justice Department weaponized the face act against peaceful protesters. And so this was a kind of big deal for her bringing

this House of Worship prong prosecution. She talks about it frequently, has made it very clear that it's something she has a very personal interest in. And in fact, in one of the face act cases, not this one that I'm talking about, but an appeal that went to the 11th circuit related to the face act, harmeet personally argued that before the 11th circuit. So clearly has this like very,

“you know, personal interest in the face act. And so I've written about that and I think that that”

part of it is very interesting, especially as it relates to, you know, we typically think of the civil rights division as as largely civil enforcement. But there's these other areas where it's a criminal enforcement aspect that the civil rights division is looking into. And sometimes in ways that are quite unusual, there's reporting that the civil rights division is investigating Cassie Hutchinson, the former White House aide who testified before the January six committee,

quite famously, and has long, you know, met the eyeer of Trump for that reason. But it's a quite unusual kind of area for this civil rights division to be investigating someone for testimony that

“they gave before Congress. And then finally, you know, in another perspective on the criminal”

enforcement side of things, there's this odd kind of connection potentially between the Fulton County FBI search for election 2020 election records. And harmeets effort to get election records from various states, including Georgia, Dylan has again seemed to take a very personal interest

in Fulton County in particular, starting basically in the fall of last year, the civil rights

division, you know, started sending letters to Fulton County asking for these 2020 election records, then filed a civil suit seeking those same records. And then it was kind of like a month later, basically, that the FBI suddenly executed a search warrant and seized those very same records that Dylan's office had been seeking. And that has then led to the plaintiffs in a suit seeking the return of those records, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners,

seeking the return of those election records is now alleging that there's some kind of pretext, you know, a connection between Dylan's office was unable to obtain these records through its own civil suit. And so what they decided to do was get the criminal division involved

reporting and what Dylan's been up to with the civil rights division. Yeah, I want to pick up on

that word used a few times unusual. Now, Quinta, as you may or may not know, I am not a constitutional law scholar, but some of these actions seem to me to reflect an unusual understanding of civil rights and the role of the civil rights division, as many people call it, the crown jewel of the DOJ, as you reference in your piece. I wonder if you could help me understand what you think, harming Dylan's conception of civil rights is and what is motivating this, as a former civil

rights division had called it, this wrecking ball to the division. And I should also note that

“for DOJ and I believe harming Dylan herself to climb to comment, but of course, you have this”

rich corpus of public posts and, and very extensive interviews with former and a believe current

DOJ members. And to continue my very long wind up, I wonder if you could do so by taking us back and the profile does such a great job of tracing some of her intellectual origins dating back to her upbringing and her time on the Dartmouth review. So could you give us a bit of a like a potted history of her bio and especially, you know, how it can help us understand what she's doing now? Dylan is an immigrant, so her family, she grew up in India until she was about six years old,

her family, her father, then moved the family to the UK, then to the US, they ended up settling in Smithfield, North Carolina, which used to be famous for having an enormous KKK billboard outside the town. She has said that her growing up in that kind of environment in, you know, small town, North Carolina actually is what made her and her parents' republicans. And her stated

reasoning, and she said this on podcast is basically that, you know, this is a state where the

Democratic Party is pretty firmly in the kind of the Dixie Crat, sort of anti civil rights category, she said in these are her words, and it was the Republicans who were in favor of integration

“and equal rights for all people. I think historically speaking, that is certainly contestable,”

it is definitely true that the Democratic North Carolina Democratic Party was not a bastion of equality of justice for all for a long time, but Dylan's parents also, she said, hosted fundraisers for Jesse Holmes, who is a famous segregationist until very late in the game, but Holmes did cultivate ties with seek activists and Dylan's family is, is seek, she's spoken a lot about her faith, it's clearly very important to her. As you say, she then went on to Dartmouth College,

I'm enjoying the Dartmouth Review, which is kind of a bomb throwing unofficial student newspaper on the right, she eventually became the editor in chief there, and while she was there, about as an editor in editor in chief, the publication had quite a few controversies involving the reviews, let's say, aggressive stories about a black musicology professor, they published a story about the the schools president who was Jewish that was titled Envolk and Wrife and Friedman,

which Dylan as a student told the New York Times was meant to be a satirical look at how conservative students were oppressed by liberal fascism, so she is definitely somebody who has

“interest in upsetting the sort of liberals around her, let's say, and I think that I would argue”

that something that continues really through her career and and through her adult life, the form that that takes is a little bit variable, so she you know, she moves to San Francisco, she advocates for seek rights after 9/11 when there were a lot of sort of misplaced hate crimes against seek, unfortunately, she spends a little bit of time on the board of ACLU of Northern California, and so what I would argue is that there's a through line there in terms of saying, you know,

I'm at the Dartmouth review, you know, upsetting liberals by puncturing liberal piety is then in Northern California, upsetting liberals by saying, I'm a different kind of Republican, you know, I'm not what I'm not what all you liberal think Republicans might be. Then she's during that period, I think she sort of is in line with the Republican parties attempt to move toward a more moderate self-presentation, particularly after Mitt Romney's

loss in 2012, you know, and try to make the party appeal to immigrants to people of color. Then when Trump takes over the party, she really is sort of like all in on on that and maintains herself as a voice within the party, but becomes a little more hard line on immigration,

about earlier, she found a firm called the Dillon Law Group, which is now run by her brother,

which sort of is very good at identifying hot button cultureboard issues and picking, you know, finding a client who's at the center of a firestorm and representing them. So she represented James Damour, who is the Google engineer who was fired from the company after writing a long memo suggesting that women were biologically less suited to be in tech. She represents Chloe Cole, who is a very prominent detransitioner. She's really sort of raises her profile through that,

kind of, you know, culture war, owning the lips, kind of work, and I would argue that this is really what gets her in the position that she's in today, where she's then nominated to serve as Assistant AG for Civil Rights, and has continued that kind of lip-owning mentality in her running of the division.

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No, you're stupid. You have the door to hang up. Yes, it's there, man. I don't know where to go. So for Anise! Heran, that's audible original Hirschbir, yet no my audible.

I'm curious, Anna, your view on this. One thing I picked up from your profile, Quinta, is

the suggestion that one of Harmy Dylan's formative lessons from her time at the review was the the use of the media. I hesitate to call it media savvy because I think it also harms her in certain ways, but Anna, how do you think about how Harmy Dylan uses media attention? How it helps her both personally in her career and in her in the activities that she wants to put forth or continue. And then also maybe how it

“hamstrings her or harm her. Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's pretty clear to me at least that”

having influence online in so far as we consider that to be a use of the media is very important to Harmy Dylan. She spends a significant amount of her time as far as I can tell just tweeting things out to the world, whether it is things as kind of routine and mundane as her gardening habits, her knitting. A lot of knitting, lots of knitting habit content, you know, she's very indeniting. She spends a lot of time knitting as far as I can tell her kitchen content, pictures

of her kitchen, pictures of food that she's making, where, you know, walks that she's going on, her exercise habits. Things like that, she spends a lot of time talking about, but then, you know, also she's doing a lot of tweeting about work as well. And she's even made very clear that often some of the things that she decides to work on are things that she's just monitoring online, you know, monitoring media reports, monitoring what is going viral online to

figure out, you know, what she thinks her office should do. I've even seen in some documents that I reviewed, public court documents, in one case that was brought against the Justice Department related to the axing of its community services program, you know, in that administrative record, one thing that pops up is Harmy Dillon telling people, look into this, based on a tip that she's received through a DM on Twitter. So, you know, it's very clear that she's, you know, using the internet

and that medium as a way to both find things to investigate for work for the, looking at the

“direction of the office, but also is curating like a persona around herself. I believe that in one of”

her, her public filings related to her financial ethics, disclosures prior to her working in government,

So, she's clearly, you know, making a lot of impressions on people through her tweeting,

“but at the same time, it can come back to bite her, at least it has thus far. So, to give you one”

example, Tyler, and this is a continual theme that we kind of see in the Justice Department where these norm violating communications that people at DOJ are making where they're talking about ongoing investigations will then eventually like find their way into these court cases and often in a way that is harmful to the positions that the Justice Department is trying to advance. So, one of the more recent examples of this relates to the foot and county case that I mentioned where there's this

pretext argument that the county is advancing as it's seeking to get its election documents back,

it's saying harming Dylan failed to get these documents through a civil suit. So, therefore,

the criminal division went in and seized them through a pretextual warrant. And really, this was all just about, you know, getting these documents for this civil rights division to review.

“And as a part of that argument, the county wanted to get some information from the government about”

the timeline. Like, when did the civil rights division stuff start? When did the criminal referral for the search warrant happen? Those kinds of things. And the government said, no, no, you can't have this information because it's privileged information. You know, it's law enforcement on going investigation, deliberative process privilege, like assertive various privileges. But meanwhile, harming Dylan had been going online on her Twitter account and then also in

various media appearances, where she's trying to really talk up the work of the civil rights division. And part of that is that she keeps getting asked about the full and county search warrant. And at one point, she even says to a reporter something to the effect of like, oh, you know, the civil rights division, we tried to get these documents this way. We tried to get

“him that way. We tried to get him that way. And none of that worked. And so then some of my colleagues”

with the criminal division went in and got a search warrant. And she doesn't quite connect them. You know, it's all, it's all very just kind of suggestive or implied. And it's not exactly clear what she's really saying about the connection between the two. But she's making public statements about the timeline that do help the county's argument that they're making, right, about this timeline and about the pretext. Meanwhile, she also has a tweet that she posts that makes it seem like there's

some connection. All of this ends up finding its way into the case as this is being litigated. And again, it, it, it kind of helps the county's argument, right? Because even though they're not able to get this information from the government because of its claims of privilege, you've got harmy Dylan out there saying things that support the very theory that the county is arguing. And so that's just one example, Tyler of how these things really can come back to bite harmy Dylan and

others at DOJ who are kind of violating these longstanding norms about talking about ongoing investigations. Quint, I wanted to turn to you to see if you had anything to add on this this point.

But first, I just wanted to pull one quote that you had a, you're quoting Dylan who was on

Tucker Carlson's podcast. She's actually addressing criticisms of her being perpetually online. And then she goes on to say, but that's actually where I see a lot of the civil rights violations in our country being exposed, which I actually don't disagree with fully, but I probably am interpreting it in a different way than she, maybe it's where a lot of the civil rights violations in our country are being committed. So yeah, what, what do you make of our, our very online

A.A.G. of the civil rights division? She's definitely very online. She's definitely, as you said, she has defended being very online as, you know, the way that she does a lot of her work. I do think Anna is totally right that, you know, there is, there is a pro and a con to this approach. It is really good if what you want is to get a lot of attention on social media. And in this iteration of the Trump administration, getting a lot of attention on social media seems to actually

be a significant driving factor in how policy is made on whether you want to call that "sloppialism" or something else. I don't think we have a great word for it yet. But there is a real feedback loop there. The flip side, of course, is as Anna says, that can really come back to, by you, when it starts showing up in court documents. And I think you, I mean, you

of done lemon and Georgia fort, the journalist, and then the anti-ice protesters in this,

the St. Paul church where the sort of the fact that this case was really, really gives every appearance of having been thrown together over the course of about a week and a half after people started complaining on Twitter that that's starting to show up in the shotiness of the government's case. And you see, the judge is frustrated that they're not handing over discovery quickly enough of the government actually had to dismiss charges against a wind defendant because it turned out

“that she was never at the protest. She had, I think, she had parked her car nearby to pick something”

up in, like, another building and the federal government jail located her nearby and indicted her

without ever bothering to, you know, interview her, check with her that she had been there. That

is really a shotie work. And you can argue even if you are somebody who thinks that there are, you know, there was a serious civil rights violation at that church or that, you know, a lot some of the issues that Dylan is bringing cases on are things that the Civil Rights Division should be concerned with. I think there is actually a good case that her approach to moving forward, these cases should be concerning from that perspective too because if you really want justice for, you know,

the parishioners of cities church, it's not clear to me how bringing a kind of slap dash case that every, every lawyer I have spoken to about this, including people who are familiar with

this kind of prosecution has said, you know, it is highly likely that this case gets thrown out

because it's so shotie. You know, how does that actually achieve anything other than getting a lot of, like, sun Twitter? You know, if you, if you think, for example, that, you know, let's take the, the loss of the recently filed against UCLA for anti-Semitism and employment practices by the Division, for example. So there's this, this lawsuit that is filed in February 26, this is filed almost a year after attorneys in the Division were told that they had one month to put together

and bring a complaint against the UC system, which, so for starters, that's backwards, right?

“Usually, you start with the evidence and then determine whether you should bring the complaint,”

but one of the attorneys who, you know, had had worked on that case and eventually quit, said, you know, look, like that, they give us a month to bring this investigation. They ended up bringing, actually filing the case a year later, they could have just given us to investigate the case. And again, if you're really concerned about what you believe is anti, you know, systematic failure to respond to anti-Semitism at UCLA, it seems to me that you

should want DOJ to actually be putting in the time and the work to seriously investigate these cases in ways that will actually resolve the issues rather than this sort of slapped ash, social media driven approach that maybe, you know, there's a lot of sound and fury, but the end result may be

“very little. And similarly, too, you know, we've seen in other cases in criminal prosecutions”

that have been brought, the Komi case, the Latisha James case, where all of these the volume of public statements can really, I mean, those cases did not reach the merits of the selective or vindictive prosecutions claim, but in both of those cases, like the amount of exhibits that support a selective or vindictive prosecution claim, so many of them were just public statements that were being made by, you know, the president by people at DOJ, the same thing in the Koma Brago Garcia

case, where that selective or vindictive prosecution claim is still pending, but was able to reach the, you know, kind of middle ground of the judge finding a presumption of vindictiveness because of public statements about the case that a top administration officials were making. And so you would think by this point, like some of these administration officials would think to themselves, oh, there's a reason why there are norms around talking about an ongoing investigation

because it preserves the integrity of the case by not talking about it, right? And so to quintess point, like, again, I just, I absolutely agree, Quinta, that like you, if you are someone who did care about preserving the integrity of these verdicts or these cases that that you would kind of think twice about speaking out of turn, like the way that some of these people have, including Harme Dillon.

whether Harme Dillon is a principled ID log that sticks to her principles and that there's a very clear, like intellectual through line throughout all of these eras or whether she blows where the Republican wins below and is does what's expedient for her career and for getting media

“attention because in, in one light, I mean, I think I ended up toward the latter after reading the piece.”

I think in one light, she moderates herself and positions during the Romney era, for example. But then I listen to a conversation you had with Laugh Fair editor-in-chief Benjamin Wittis, and it seemed like you were, your interpretation was more so the former that there actually is this, this course set of beliefs that she sticks to. Could you speak a bit about that dichotomy? I do think that, you know, there there is a serious ideological through line here just from

public statements, right? This is somebody who has always been a Republican who has always been on the

right side of the aisle and whose commitments they're do seem to be, you know, genuine. There are some things that she clearly feels very strongly about. I mean, like I've said, I think she seems to feel very strongly about religious freedom. That is a through line in her work. It's work that she did for seek communities after 9/11. She's spoken a lot about, you know, the important of her own religious faith in her life. And so I do think that that is consistent to me.

This is something I didn't really have space to get into during the piece, but one of the ways

that she kind of raised her profile near the end of the second Trump administration, or excuse me,

first Trump administration, was by litigating a bunch of COVID cases for churches and other health of the worship where people wanted to gather in person despite COVID restrictions. And she has

“framed that as a religious freedom issue. So I think that that remains very consistent. And I think”

you can arguably see that in the city's church case, for example, and other statements that she's made about, you know, caring a lot about ensuring access, you know, free access to houses of worship, whether under the face act, or other provisions. She does seem to have been consistent for a long period of time in a antipathy toward affirmative action. As we have typically understood it in a range of areas and an belief that, you know, the Democratic Party has been overly concerned with what I guess we

now called DEA in attempting to alleviate historical discrepancy is that she's sort of in the model of a more traditional and conservative, you know, stop discriminating that the John Roberts, the way to stop discrimination on the basis of racist, just stop discriminating on the basis of race or gender, right? Anything along those lines? I do think that that has put her at odds with some aspects of the current mega coalition. For example, you know, people who are calling for, say,

pro-white affirmative action, that is a position that she is expressed real discomfort with. But then there are also issues where she, her position appears to have changed over time, sort of in line with the prevailing position of the Republican Party. So immigration, for example, she, you know, previously during kind of the 2012 period, had spoken a lot about the need for the Republican Party to appeal to immigrants. And now she is taking a much, much harder line on

not just a regular immigration, you know, people coming here who are undocumented or don't have permanent legal status, but also even, you know, a legal immigration, she said recently an apocalypse that she thought that the U.S. should be a country where, you know, the immigrant doctor or lawyer is the exception. So that, that is something where her position has kind of changed more.

“So all in all, I think what I would say is that there is a real consistency here. There is also some”

willingness to kind of go where the wind is blowing. Clinton, you teed up perfectly, the place where I want to end, which is Harmy Dylan's future and the limits of her ambition, I guess. There's a ceiling there for her, it seems, in Maga World, not only for what she says and has done, but just who she is, a Seek woman of color from an immigrant background. I want to go to Anna

first to, for you to speculate of what you see as Harmy Dylan's future will she continue to

climb the ranks at DOJ or will she hit the, the shelves of racism, I guess, within, for lack of a

Quinta mostly on this because I'm just so curious for her thoughts, but, you know, I, I would say at this

“point, if there's a reason why Harmy Dylan doesn't ascend to a higher position, I think that”

it might have more to do with internal maga squabbling than it does to do with, you know, any kind of racial or ethnic reason or discrimination or something to that effect. But I think that it certainly it seems to me that it's, you know, there's reporting that Dylan could be promoted within DOJ. I am not entirely sure whether or not that's going to happen, but I could see it happening. I feel like I just don't really know. Yeah, I feel like the shifting coalitions are really hard

to keep track of from outside. And so Tyler, I think what you're referencing is so after Pam Bonny, after Trump fired Pam Bonny, there was reporting that Dylan was in the running, you know, for stepping into the attorney general role. It wasn't really clear whether that would have been in an acting basis or as a formal nominee. There was also reporting that she was going to

basically step up from her current position to the third ranking role in DOJ, the associate attorney

general position. The problem, of course, is that there's somebody who's already in that drop, his name is Stanley Woodward. He was a former Trump defense attorney. And so there was a very confused and curious of maybe 24 hours or so where a bunch of right wing outlets reported that Woodward had already been fired and that Dylan was about to be promoted. And then Woodward showed up at work the next day and his name was on a bunch of course, and he appears to still be there. So I for one

and somewhat confused about what exactly was happening during that period, it seems pretty clear

that something was happening behind the scenes. I don't know what that something was, but Stan Woodward

“still has his job and Hermit Dylan is still in her job. So I think it's pretty clear that she has”

enough of a fan base among the kind of like mega influencers on acts that might in this administration where that kind of thing is really important might help boost her chances of moving upward. You know, there were a lot of people on the right, including some pretty prominent voices, posting that she should be the next associate attorney general or attorney general. And so I could, you know, at matters in this administration, that said it also seems pretty clear that at this

point Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general who's not the acting AG is kind of settling into the role and it's a little hard for me to see how Dylan could conceivably push him out, unless Trump gets angry at him for something or another. So I guess what I'm saying to Anna's point is that it really is a question of kind of the co-eitional politics of maga. That said, I do think that the fact that, you know, for the sort of really hard right mega folks in line with the, you know,

Nick Fuente's gripper faction, you know, there is a not only a white nationalism and Christian nationalism, but specifically anti-South Asian racism that has really grown among that faction. You see it if you click on Dylan's Twitter posts. There's some really, really ugly appalling, in fact, of being leveled at her racial slurs, people telling her to go back to India and ways that are genuinely disturbing. And I do wonder if, you know, given that all of this is

about co-eitional politics within the sort of the maga movement who will make the people online happy,

“whether that might be a problem for her going forward. I think it's something that she's”

trying to navigate. You know, we can, again, I would have loved to ask her about this. Unfortunately, I didn't have the chance, so we can only see how she does it in the public eye. But I do think that it's, you know, it's one aspect of the tensions that Trump's movement is now facing. You know, he sort of came into office in 2024 on the back of a coalition of voters. That was more multiracial than any Republican president had had managed to put together for

quite a long time. And that there's indications that that base of support is now kind of peeling off and falling apart. And I think that Dylan, you know, has an unusually prominent role as a woman of color in this administration. And so her, she is sort of positioned in such a way that

coal mine for how the Republican party right now handles those tensions. Yeah, I, I do wonder

“a great deal how she thinks of that that tension, given that she does strike me as someone who would”

read the replies and see this. And she does have his moment that the rare moments one that you mentioned in the piece, which she said something like she wishes there was a groi per filter or, you know, sort of a distance in yourself from Nick Fuentes and his ilk while at the same time, you know, occupying the same interview seat across from Tucker Carlson that Nick Fuentes did, which again caused a bit of a stir in the mega right. But so I lied earlier, I actually want to end where you

ended the piece, Quinta, which is this recognition and acknowledgement that what you say out in the real world, the Civil Rights Division under Army Dillon's leadership has already felt and it's felt both in what the division is doing and not doing. So I want to end there if you could just tell us a bit about what you think the legacy of Army Dillon's tenure will be as it, as it's felt out in the

“real world. I think there are a few different ways. One is, you know, there are cases that this division”

is bringing that under a previous administration, Republican or Democratic, it would probably never

have brought. And we've talked about a number of those investigations. I think that those cases are, you know, there's damage that is done there in terms of frightening people out of exercising legitimate rights, just the work and money that has to be put in to defend yourself against some of these, you know, investigations, prosecutions, litigation. There's also a lot of work that isn't being done. And some of that is not being done because Dillon has reoriented the division away

from those traditional priorities. Some of it isn't being done because there just aren't enough people because everyone has left. You know, if you look at the division's press release section, the disability rights section is still, you know, they are still doing some investigations and

“mitigating some cases, but it's not at the same level, but it has been under previous administrations.”

Again, even under Republican administrations, one really disturbing an example that I was alerted to is if you look at view search for Title IX cases brought by the division under this administration, so Title IX being the civil rights statute that ensures equal access to educational opportunities between men and women. All of this Title IX cases that this division has put out press releases about half to do with how schools and school districts are handling transgender

students or transgender athletes. I could not find public records of anything that had to do with, for example, you know, sexual assault allegations, which is sort of a very traditional use of Title IX, you know, ensuring that educational resources are not being denied to girls. And so, you know, that doesn't mean that those things aren't happening. It just means that there's nobody there at the federal level, which has historically kind of been, you know, the backstop when states

are local jurisdictions don't have the resources or don't care. No one is there to investigate and come in and sort of play that role. So I will say that, you know, the attorneys who I spoke to who had left the division, all a lot of them felt very conflicted about that decision, because they said, you know, look like people who are there now are basically there to do harm reduction, right? They want to continue doing their work as best they can. They want to continue

trying to protect people, but the problem is that there just there aren't enough of them. And so I

think that that is concerning both because of all the cases that aren't getting bright. And because it's kind of a green light, you know, if you're a school district, you know that nobody's going to do anything if you have a serious sexual assault problem, for example. And so that is not only a problem right now, but it's going to be a problem in the future under, you know, if we have a future administration that's more interested in returning to traditional civil rights work, whether

a Republican or Democratic, just because the division is still so understaffed that you would have to put an enormous amount of resources into re-staffing at a level where you have the resources and the expertise to pursue those cases that really, really need to be brought. Well, we will have to leave it on that somewhat tower note, but Quinta, Jurassic, and Annabauer. Thank you so much for joining me and thank you both for your reporting. Quinta, the profile is great.

It really helped me understand not only this enigma that we see posting online constantly, but also just the greater dynamics of the Justice Department. So thank you both.

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