Rep. Jamie Raskin is doing what he does best — attacking Donald Trump while ignoring the victims.
This time, the Maryland Democrat is rushing to the defense of Ivy League universities accused of enabling rampant antisemitism, all because the Trump administration’s DOJ had the audacity to actually enforce civil rights law.
The drama started when The Washington Post ran a breathless “Breaking News” story claiming the Trump administration “pressured universities into punitive settlements despite little to no evidence of systemic abuse.” The evidence? A 25-page whistleblower complaint from DOJ career attorneys unhappy their recommendations got overruled.
Within 24 hours, Raskin fired off a seven-page screed to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon accusing her of running a “fake” investigation.
“This sham investigation is and will remain a shameful stain on the record of the Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Division and represents a clear and present danger to American academic preeminence in the world.”
A clear and present danger. Those are the words Raskin chose to describe enforcing civil rights protections for Jewish students.
The congressman has set himself a tricky task. He needs to acknowledge antisemitism exists — denying it entirely would cost him public support — while simultaneously claiming Trump’s DOJ manufactured the crisis as a “pretext” to punish universities for “protected speech.”
Protected speech like occupying buildings? Threatening Jewish students? Destroying property? Holding janitors hostage?
After October 7, 2023, campuses saw a sharp spike in antisemitic incidents. The Anti-Defamation League tracked thousands of assaults, harassment cases, vandalism, and disruptive protests in 2023-24. Columbia frequently ranked at the top, followed by Harvard and Penn.
Encampments spread to over 100 campuses. Some involved building occupations — Hamilton Hall at Columbia — property damage, and explicit chants supporting the militant group responsible for the attacks or calling for the destruction of Israel.
Jewish students reported exclusion from campus spaces, harassment, and fear of identifying as Jewish. Surveys showed majorities experiencing or witnessing hostility, with particularly severe environments documented at Columbia, Penn, and other elite institutions.
University leadership’s response was widely seen as inadequate until external pressure mounted.
The December 2023 House hearing produced the viral exchange where Harvard president Claudine Gay, Penn president Liz Magill, and MIT’s president refused clear answers on whether calling for targeting Jews violated campus rules. Their answer: “it depends on the context.”
Magill and Gay resigned amid the fallout. Columbia’s Minouche Shafik faced her own hearing later.
Little to no evidence of systemic abuse?
Mark Goldfeder, Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center, dismantled the whistleblower complaint in a detailed analysis. He identified the core grievance: “Career attorneys were reassigned to work they didn’t choose, on timelines they didn’t like, and leadership overruled their recommendations. In most workplaces this is called Tuesday.”
The complaint measures everything against “longstanding investigative practices,” Goldfeder noted. It never asks what those practices produced for Jewish students — complaints aging in queues while encampments grew and students were told to stay home for their own safety.
“The longstanding practice was non-enforcement with excellent paperwork.”
Goldfeder posed the substitution test. What if black students had complained for years about harassment, only to find the law suddenly enforced under Trump? Would Raskin be thundering about predetermined outcomes? Would we be celebrating whistleblowers?
On the contrary. We would ask what took the DOJ so long.
The timing of Raskin’s attack is worth noting. Days earlier, on August 14, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns dismissed the Trump administration’s case against Harvard for failing to address campus hostility. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling.
But the dismissal gave Raskin the cover he needed to wheel out the word “pretext.”
Raskin and his allies can’t bear to acknowledge that Donald Trump was doing something about antisemitism while they looked the other way. So they tie themselves in knots, claiming the administration went after Columbia, Harvard, and Penn not because of flagrant violations but because Trump supposedly hates free speech and elite education.
Goldfeder’s conclusion cuts to the heart of it: “These members of Congress want to investigate whether the government moved too fast for Jewish students. Nobody ever convened a hearing on why it moved not at all. That asymmetry is the whole story, and no whistleblower has come forward about it yet.”
Nor will one.
The "whistleblower" disclosure against the antisemitism Task Force is 25 pages of career attorneys complaining that leadership overruled them. I read every page. Its own facts acquit the administration repeatedly and convict the system they had in place before.
Let me explain: https://t.co/sGJFK917AA— Mark Goldfeder (@MarkGoldfeder) August 19, 2026
