The team assigned to Brown reached a conclusion. According to the complaint, leadership would not let them file it.
WASHINGTON—Citing procedural irregularities and outcomes fixed before the evidence was weighed, lawyers for a former Justice Department attorney filed a whistleblower disclosure Tuesday alleging that the administration’s antisemitism task force pressed three Ivy League universities toward settlements that the underlying investigations did not support.
The disclosure went to the inspectors general at the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services and to the Office of Special Counsel. Eric Tucker and Alanna Durkin Richer of the Associated Press obtained the complaint and reported it Tuesday evening. Its author is Haley Van Erem, who spent close to a decade in the Civil Rights Division before being assigned against her wishes to HHS to work the Title VI files. She describes the effort as “an unlawful process designed to achieve predetermined political goals.”
Kiersten Pels, a Justice Department spokeswoman, defended the integrity of the investigations. HHS did not respond to questions Tuesday.
Where the Antisemitism Task Force Started
Attorney General Pam Bondi launched the antisemitism task force in February 2025 as a multiagency group. The lawyers detailed to HHS were told at the outset to examine antisemitic conduct at medical school commencement ceremonies, and the complaint records how they learned of the problem. They were pointed to an article in the New York Post about graduation events.
From that starting point the inquiries widened. In the cases of Columbia and Brown they came to cover the whole university.
The Finding That Could Not Be Filed
At Brown, according to the complaint, the investigative team worked the file and found nothing supporting a violation of Title VI, the provision of the Civil Rights Act barring discrimination by race, color or national origin at institutions taking federal money. The team was prepared to issue a notice of no violation. The complaint says leadership declined to permit one and directed staff toward a settlement while acknowledging that no legal basis for a settlement existed.
Brown paid $50 million. The money went to Rhode Island workforce development organizations rather than to the Treasury, and it closed three federal investigations covering both antisemitism and racial bias in admissions. The agreement carries no findings of wrongdoing.
What the Antisemitism Task Force Collected
Columbia was different in one respect. Investigators there did find evidence of discrimination. The complaint says the work ran on a schedule that closed before the factual development and legal review were finished, and that parts of the case rested on assertions that were unsupported, drawn from news accounts and court filings, or aimed at activity the First Amendment protects. Columbia paid the government $200 million and regained access to federal funding.
Harvard drew the freezes. Officials discussed suspending funding and drafted settlement terms before any investigation had established a Title VI violation. Sean Keveney, then the acting general counsel at HHS, told colleagues he expected Harvard to settle because the university was “over a barrel,” the complaint says.
A School That Went to Court Instead
Harvard did not settle. A federal judge ordered the administration last year to restore more than $2.6 billion in research funding, finding that antisemitism had served as cover for an ideological campaign against the country’s leading universities. A second judge dismissed the department’s lawsuit against the school last week.
Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on House Judiciary, wrote to Harmeet Dhillon, who runs the Civil Rights Division. He stated plainly that antisemitism at colleges and medical schools is a real problem and needs investigating, and that the antisemitism task force had not investigated it. Campus protests over the war in Gaza left some Jewish students saying they felt unsafe, and the administration came into office promising to address what it described as years of official indifference.
The complaint also alleges that officials went after Middle East Studies faculty over the content of their scholarship and other professors over their Muslim faith. Van Erem left the department in May 2025. She would not stay exposed, she wrote, to more investigations built on neither fact nor law. Newswax reported last week on a Treasury rule ordering the deletion of shell-company ownership records that Congress has never repealed the law requiring.
Two universities paid a combined $250 million. Neither of those cases reached a courtroom. The one case that did reach a courtroom was dismissed, and that school paid nothing.
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