Assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon scours social media for tips to act for justice

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon is among the most active Trump officials on social media — and it’s not just her own posts.

Ms. Dhillon said she scours her accounts looking for ideas for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which she oversees and which handles everything from voting rights to defending the disabled to enforcing First Amendment religious rights.

“Before I get out of bed, I crack open social media and I have immediately a number of leads and I send them to a dozen different lawyers I work with who head our different departments and say, ’I need you to look at this issue, seems to be a violation happening in this school, what is going on with this professor violating the rights of these students, let’s get to the bottom of this, let’s find out if this media report is true,’” she told “The Sitdown With Alex Swoyer,” a Washington Times podcast.

She added: “It’s fun and creative, and sometimes a single tweet or opening up an investigation immediately puts a stop to an unconstitutional violation of someone’s civil rights, and that’s a beautiful thing.”

Ms. Dhillon, a former civil rights lawyer, has stormed into her role as assistant attorney general, steering the Civil Rights Division away from Biden priorities — while using some of the tactics the Biden DOJ pioneered.

After watching her predecessor go after protesters at abortion clinics by using a 19th-century law aimed at the Ku Klux Klan, Ms. Dhillon this year turned that law on the protesters who disrupted a church service in Minnesota in January.

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Thirty-nine people have been arrested and charged in connection with the disruption. Among them is former CNN journalist Don Lemon, who said he was at Cities Church in St. Paul acting as a reporter.

The prosecution has come under fire from liberals and some conservative activists, who questioned whether it violated First Amendment rights.

But Ms. Dhillon said the churchgoers were afraid, particularly given that a Catholic school in Minnesota was the scene of a gunman’s attack last summer that left two children dead.

“When this takeover occurred, these people were terrorized,” Ms. Dhillon said. “They thought that they were in the middle of a mass shooting incident.”

The DOJ has charged the intruders under both the KKK Act and the FACE Act, which the Biden administration used against those who impede abortion clinics but which also applies to those who disrupt houses of worship.

“Thank you, Biden DOJ,” she said.

Ms. Dhillon said churches and synagogues have been particular targets this year, but she’s ready to defend all houses of worship.

“It wasn’t a priority of the last administration, let’s be blunt. It is a top priority of this administration,” she said.

Her Biden-appointed predecessor at the Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, criticized the Minnesota church prosecutions, telling CBS she didn’t think the FACE Act could be used in this way.

“This is wholly outside the core purpose that the law was passed,” Ms. Clarke told CBS News, predicting the charges would be “quickly thrown out.”

Ms. Dhillon called that “a really ignorant comment.”

“The provisions regarding abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers, they’re pretty much identical,” she said. “Courts will ultimately rule on this, but Kristen Clarke is not a judge.”

Ms. Dhillon is also at the forefront of President Trump’s quest for cleaner voter rolls. She said 15 states have cooperated in sharing their voter lists, complete with identifying numbers that would let the feds spot deceased people, noncitizens and those registered across multiple states.

“These are pretty basic things that every secretary of state should want,” she said.

But others are resisting, citing their own privacy laws. Her division has filed 29 lawsuits against GOP- and Democrat-run states, plus the District of Columbia, demanding full access.

“The federal government actually issues the Social Security numbers, so keeping information confidential from us is dumb,” she said.

Plus, she said, states themselves don’t always keep the information private.

She pointed out that a number of the states voluntarily share the same information she’s seeking with each other, through the Electronic Registration Information Center.

And the information has leaked in other ways.

“[Washington state] had a hack of their entire driver license database, so it is not super secure in Washington apparently, and the same information they are refusing to give us is the same information some hacker has now,” she said.