Ep 255 | Will Violent Activists Go to Jail? DOJ’s Harmeet Dhillon UNLEASHED | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Speaker 1 My next guest, apparently responsible for a bloodbath in the civil rights division of the DOJ, she says not so much.

Speaker 1 The ACLU says she has a long record of working to restrict voting rights, transgender rights, and abortion access. Hmm? No.

Speaker 1 The NAACP calls her a grave threat to democracy. I don't even know who she is and I love her already, right?

Speaker 1 She's the woman who will wrestle back that one piece of the DOJ from the clutches of wokeness and that has the deep state quaking in its boots.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the nationally recognized civil rights and constitutional law attorney, tough tough as nails, good friend of the program, the new assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S.

Speaker 1 Department of Justice. If you think the DOJ isn't doing anything yet, let me introduce you to my friend Harmeet Dillon.

Speaker 1 Harmeet, I am thrilled to have you on. You are

Speaker 1 the perfect person at the DOJ for civil rights because you're a machine

Speaker 1 and you have, you're tough as nails. And I'm thrilled that this is a position you're in.
For anybody who doesn't know, what is the Office of Civil Rights at the DOJ? What is it supposed to do?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 it's a very important part of the civil rights

Speaker 2 movement in the sense that out of the civil rights movement came this enforcement arm to enforce all of of the federal civil rights laws.

Speaker 2 So, you know, dating back to desegregation, the civil rights division was in charge of enforcing those laws that desegregated the South and other areas.

Speaker 2 We're also in charge of making sure that citizens aren't unduly the subject of police brutality or violence or illegal police practices. We protect veterans' rights.

Speaker 2 We enforce the Americans with Disabilities Act. We enforce the federal civil rights laws relating to housing and employment and anti-discrimination and education.

Speaker 2 And importantly, we also enforce federal voting statutes, Help America Vote Act, NVRA, and the Voting Rights Act. And so

Speaker 2 it's a lot. It's a huge portfolio.

Speaker 2 And within that, there's so many different emphases and ways that the Department of Justice can make lives better for American citizens or make lives miserable for a few disfavored people.

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Speaker 1 So I have heard since you got on, it was described by an official at the senior attorney, said that it was a bloodbath that's happening now at the DOJ under you.

Speaker 1 What do they mean by that?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, it's a colorful rhetoric and none of these people had the guts to attach their names to these colorful quotes.

Speaker 2 But what What people in the private sector would call a severance package proposal offered to federal government officials almost throughout the entire federal government.

Speaker 2 Many people in the civil rights division have chosen to take that generous severance package, which pays them for several months while they do nothing.

Speaker 2 I mean, I wish someone would pay me several months to do nothing, but I actually have never had that opportunity.

Speaker 2 No one has been fired by me since I came.

Speaker 2 This is like my 15th day on the job.

Speaker 2 But what we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division is that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden.

Speaker 2 And we start with the statutory basis because that's where you always start as a lawyer and the Constitution. And then we tell them, these are the president's priorities.

Speaker 2 This is what we will be focusing on.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 govern yourself accordingly. And

Speaker 2 en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys attorneys decided that they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do.

Speaker 2 And I think that's fine because we don't want people in the federal government who feel like it's their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence.

Speaker 2 That's not the job here. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.
And so, you know, that's fine.

Speaker 2 We need to replace those people because I have a very robust affirmative civil rights agenda that I think many Americans will be pleased with.

Speaker 1 So I have to tell you,

Speaker 1 we saw each other earlier this week, and I, you know, I made it very clear. I'm very concerned that the Department of Justice and the FBI don't seem to be moving very rapidly.

Speaker 1 on some things where people need to go to,

Speaker 1 if there's evidence, they committed a crime, I don't care what party they're in, they need to be prosecuted, heard by a jury of their peers, and if they're found guilty, go to jail.

Speaker 1 And I don't see a lot of the fast action.

Speaker 1 And then you just kind of smiled at me and said, well, I've been on the job for about 15 days. Here's what I did just this week.

Speaker 1 Let's go through some of the things that you're doing. Let's start with the anti-Christian.

Speaker 1 persecution that you are going after now.

Speaker 2 Right, absolutely. Well, you know, the president signed an executive order targeting anti-Christian bias in federal agencies.

Speaker 2 And that tallies with some of our civil rights agenda, which is to protect the rights of people of faith throughout the United States, whether they're in federal agencies or not.

Speaker 2 And some of the most egregious violations are occurring in the states.

Speaker 2 Everyone is familiar with what happened during COVID, and our federal government stood by while Christians and everybody of faith, including my faith and others, were persecuted and not allowed to pray.

Speaker 2 So now, what the federal government is doing, and we convened a meeting of all, invited all the cabinet officials, and many of them came and told tales of persecution happening in the ranks of the federal government.

Speaker 2 For example, Department of Defense dismissing thousands of brave soldiers for refusing to take a vaccine shot that was not necessary for them in their opinion and violated their religious principles.

Speaker 2 Now,

Speaker 2 Pete Hagseth has invited those folks back, most of them if they want. I think that's a great step.

Speaker 2 But the job in this project is to investigate what happened, write it, and make sure it never happens again. And we stop the systematic bias against people of faith, in this case, Christians.

Speaker 2 We're also going after the notorious anti-Semitic violence and discrimination happening throughout the United States, but specifically on American college campuses.

Speaker 2 The most elite campuses in the United States are the places where the most egregious violations are occurring. And this is squarely within the purview of the Civil Rights Division to go after.

Speaker 2 You and I discussed the FACE Act, which is a law that was passed

Speaker 2 many years ago that is supposed to protect people going into abortion facilities from violence.

Speaker 2 The only violence being done in recent years is to the law and to the rights of speech and a prayer of people of faith who want to pray, which is in their entire First Amendment right outside abortion facilities.

Speaker 2 those americans elderly and young americans have been arrested and persecuted by the biden doj and so one of the first things that was done under the new administration was to dismiss multiple cases cases in tennessee pennsylvania and ohio have been dismissed we are not going to be pursuing these face act cases other than in extraordinary circumstances involving death serious bodily harm or extreme property damage and none of the recent cases have any of those fact patterns well hang on just instead the Department of Justice Can you go can you use the FACE Act to get the people that are firebombing

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 doing harm on the other side?

Speaker 2 Well, I was going to get to that, which is that facilities

Speaker 2 involving prenatal care

Speaker 2 are protected by the FACE Act. And so we will be aggressively going after.

Speaker 2 There were more than 200 incidents in the last few years of those kinds of facilities where people were counseled about their choices, about adoption, about keeping the baby.

Speaker 2 Those facilities have been violently attacked by

Speaker 2 activists with no action by law enforcement, federal or state. We will be going after those cases because every woman has a right to go into those facilities and get fair, open, and even

Speaker 2 in some cases,

Speaker 2 religiously inflected advice about their choices with respect to the baby

Speaker 2 that they are growing in their bodies.

Speaker 1 I know that church after church after church has been destroyed and firebombed all over the country, and those people never seem to go to jail. Nobody seems to notice a

Speaker 2 that's not true, Glide. So, you know, again,

Speaker 2 we actually have won prosecutions of firebombings of churches in recent weeks in the civil rights division. Our criminal section has done a tremendous job going after that.
And

Speaker 1 so it's right now, but it is changing and i encourage people okay so it's changing

Speaker 2 changing but yeah it's changing now it is changing now and and i i have to be fair whenever a house of worship in the united states has been attacked it has generally been the policy of the civil rights division even in democratic administrations to prosecute that so that has kind of been a constant but we promise to put an additional effort on that important um important area because not just christians it is all people of faith are under attack here in the united states

Speaker 1 If somebody's going into a mosque, I feel exactly the same way. I mean, you don't

Speaker 1 go after religion here in America.

Speaker 2 Exactly. Exactly.
So that is not even a controversial thing here. We'll be continuing to do that aggressively.
But, you know, there's so many ways you can change an emphasis.

Speaker 2 So, for example, yesterday the president signed a very important, some might find it boring because it uses statistics. It said we're not going to be using

Speaker 2 disparate impact analysis anymore in our law enforcement.

Speaker 2 And what that means for Americans is it is rolling back a very discredited and should be overruled line of cases that says that a company can be sued or a police department can be sued just for

Speaker 2 policies that are facially neutral, but allegedly have a disparate impact on people of certain backgrounds.

Speaker 2 So, for example, if there's a police department and there's a neutral test involving math or involving something basic. And 2% fewer African Americans pass that test than white Americans.

Speaker 2 Lawsuit time by the Civil Rights Division. We're not doing, we're not in that business anymore pursuant to the executive order.

Speaker 1 Wasn't that, I mean, that was important when, you know, you had poll taxes or you had tests where.

Speaker 1 you know, you, an African-American back in the 1800s, even the 18 or 1920s would walk into a place down south and they'd have to say, you know, oh, you guys have to answer a few questions.

Speaker 1 How many windows are in the White House on the first floor?

Speaker 1 That kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 But when it is given to everyone and it is a requirement, I mean, I think it's insane that we're looking at somebody's background

Speaker 1 when they're in charge of a flight center.

Speaker 1 You know, we have to have standards.

Speaker 2 Well, you're absolutely correct.

Speaker 2 And, I mean, this disparate impact analysis is actually much more recent vintage than the egregious examples that you mentioned where we had to have a Civil Rights Act in this country because we had a history of discrimination.

Speaker 2 Let's not sugarcoat it. But it's 2025 today.
And the idea that some police department or some big employer can be sued because of statistics which can be manipulated is ludicrous and it is unfair.

Speaker 2 So Where an employer or a police department or a fire department actively discriminates against someone on the basis of their race, we will be taking action on that kind of case, not passive statistical analysis.

Speaker 1 So when you look at things that have been done where

Speaker 1 it's not okay not to be racist, you have to be anti-racist, which flips the entire thing upside down. How prevalent is that in our government? And what are we doing to solve those things?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I'm new to examining government websites. It's not my favorite topic.
But I will tell you that if you call the government government-sponsored education, I'll give you one example.

Speaker 2 I was looking at the UC Berkeley website the other day. To become a graduate applicant in chemistry, you have to list out in your personal statement five different ways you have.

Speaker 2 exhibited your allyship towards oppressed people.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure what that has to do with chemistry. I mean, that's a rhetorical question that's got nothing to do with chemistry.

Speaker 2 And why should you be compelled to take particular political viewpoints to get a chemistry graduate degree? That is from a government sponsored entity.

Speaker 2 That is absurd and unconstitutional, in my opinion, and illegal. And we will be rooting out that kind of discrimination and compelled speech wherever we find it.

Speaker 1 You know, everybody is, you know, Biden took great pains to hide it. A lot of agencies, they changed the names of things, went into hiding.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's when you have as much time as they have and the resources that they were stealing,

Speaker 1 you know, you can hide in a million different things. How confident are you that we could in

Speaker 1 four years, God forbid, things go back?

Speaker 1 You can

Speaker 1 take some of these things and

Speaker 1 build systems where they can't be infiltrated again or that we get the bad guys.

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Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 okay, I have currently, you know, some 200, some, 300-ish attorneys in the Civil Rights Division. There are thousands of institutions of higher learning in the United States, like 6,000 of them.

Speaker 2 I've sent out letters to the top ones in the United States asking for some information about how they changed their practices after the landmark case against Harvard students for fair admissions, and responses are rolling rolling in, conversations are happening.

Speaker 2 But to eradicate it the way that you just described, we need sufficient resources to do that because yes, the people who have been doing it are both very clever and well-funded and they've also been doing it for a very long time in scale.

Speaker 2 They're very dedicated to it. And George Soros and many other liberal

Speaker 2 funders have promulgated hundreds, if not thousands of pseudo-nonprofits whose job it has been to borrow into every level.

Speaker 2 I mean every every pension fund of a public pension fund in the United States for retirement agencies, for government workers, CalPERS in California, they can't make investments that don't comply with these DEI agendas.

Speaker 2 So every retiree is subject to some form of

Speaker 2 this problem, which in turn affects every company in the United States. It's publicly traded, many privately traded as well.

Speaker 2 And so it's a huge problem, and we can't tackle it without sufficient resources.

Speaker 1 What are those resources you need?

Speaker 2 I mean, you need more lawyers, investigators, and commitment to do the work. And you need the people in the United States identifying these things for us.

Speaker 2 We can only have so many eyes and ears and hours in the day. Every one of my people who's joined me in the civil rights division in the front office, we're working long hours.

Speaker 2 Every few minutes I'm flagging a project. Oh my God, look at this.
Look at that. What is happening here? Put an attorney working on it.

Speaker 2 We're going to run out of attorneys to work on these things at some point. So, you know, hopefully we'll solve some of these problems with with some big cases.

Speaker 2 The effort that is going on against the anti-Semitism at some of the Ivy League institutions and other big institutions, open investigation at UCLA, these are going to have a big impact.

Speaker 2 You don't have to sue everybody. You have to sue and make some cases stick.
And for all the people who are impatient, I understand people are impatient.

Speaker 2 You can't build a bulletproof case against people who've been doing bad for decades in two weeks. It's not going to happen and the case won't stick.

Speaker 1 So I think, you know, as we talked, you know, I said, what is happening at the DOJ? And you said, a lot is happening at DOJ. Nobody's talking about it.

Speaker 1 That's why I wanted to make sure that people heard.

Speaker 1 I don't think it's that you haven't put anybody in jail. And I don't mean you, but you know, we haven't seen that.
It's that people are not aware of what is going on behind the scenes. You know,

Speaker 1 when the whole thing with

Speaker 1 Epstein happened with Pam Bondi, I said, wait, let's tap the brakes here. Yeah, that pisses me off that it went out that way.

Speaker 1 However, I'm not sure that Pam isn't saying, wait, do you want satisfaction or do you want people to go to jail?

Speaker 1 Because you can't, you have to build a case before you lay everything out in front of the American people. And I want people to go to jail.

Speaker 1 I think what people just want to know is that there is progress being made, that they didn't vote for enough of all of this insanity and then nothing is happening.

Speaker 1 That's why I think you're so important.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you, Glenn. But, you know, all the people working in the government who left their comfortable, successful lives to come here to DC.

Speaker 2 My voice is different because I'm suffering from the allergies over here. It's not pleasant, not my favorite thing.
However, we did it because we believe so deeply that this is a

Speaker 2 maybe last chance in the United States to turn this ship around. It has been going in the wrong direction.

Speaker 2 And even prior Republican administrations, unfortunately, haven't taken an axe to the edifice weaponizing the government against the people for many years.

Speaker 2 And now we have a president dedicated to doing it.

Speaker 1 You see that happening.

Speaker 2 It is happening. I went over to meet with my good friend Cash Patel across the street from me in the FBI building yesterday.
We had an excellent conversation about matters of common interest.

Speaker 2 And I can tell you that he and his team are working extremely hard.

Speaker 2 But if people just on social media followed the social media accounts of the Department of Justice, the top officials, the FBI, they're making arrests, they're putting away criminals, they're bringing cases on a daily basis.

Speaker 2 And so, just complaining because you're not seeing it in the format you want is kind of lazy, quite frankly. I think people need to go and find the information we're putting out regularly.

Speaker 1 So, you said that we need resources, but

Speaker 1 we also need attorneys.

Speaker 1 How do you go about

Speaker 1 finding people who are the real deal and who are moles? And I mean,

Speaker 1 it's got to be really frustrating on not knowing who to trust.

Speaker 1 How are you vetting people?

Speaker 2 Well, so look, it's an administrative challenge to come into a major agency and change course.

Speaker 2 The civil rights division of the Department of Justice, speaking very frankly, has been described by many people as, you know, sort of, oh, they'll never change.

Speaker 2 People spend their whole careers there doing one particular kind of litigation, suing the police, suing the police some more, suing employers.

Speaker 2 And it's their part of it is their personal passion, okay? Well, this isn't the personal passion department here. It is the enforcement of the civil rights laws department.

Speaker 2 And so I will tell you, there are many fine career lawyers at the Department of Justice. Civil rights division.
They don't have to agree with me. What they have to do is do the job that is assigned.

Speaker 2 And there are many who are doing that.

Speaker 2 and there's some who looked at the memos i sent out saying this is a new priority and they're like we're not doing that we we are doing this other thing and i said that's not that that's not on offer anymore there's no menu here this is not mcdonald's you're gonna have to do what's on offer here and so what we now need to do once all the dust settles and people are off the books is we are we are looking at resumes of lawyers who want to do that work.

Speaker 2 I don't care what their politics are. It is not relevant.

Speaker 2 I do care that they're willing to take direction and zealously enforce the civil rights of the United States according to the priorities of this president. They're not surprising.

Speaker 2 They're literally on the internet in executive orders, and the statutes are there as well. And so I don't think it's going to be hard to be honest with you to fill those positions.

Speaker 1 Aren't they also in the Bill of Rights? I mean, it's not like the president is saying, hey,

Speaker 1 we're going to ignore these rights. I mean,

Speaker 1 if your civil rights have been violated, the job of the Justice Department is to investigate it, find out if it's true, and prosecute if it's right.

Speaker 1 Doesn't matter who the president is.

Speaker 2 First Amendment, I mean, you know, the new project I've got going in the civil rights division, to the surprise of many people on both sides, is the Second Amendment.

Speaker 2 Who's protecting the Second Amendment in the federal government? Prior Republican administrations haven't paid a lot of attention to affirmatively doing that. But

Speaker 2 in the wake of clear guidance from the United States Supreme Court protecting our right to

Speaker 2 own and use firearms in most circumstances throughout the United States, city after city, state after state are eviscerating those rights.

Speaker 2 They're mocking the Supreme Court by passing laws that make it virtually impossible. Colorado just passed a law that is extremely onerous and imposes a financial burden on gun ownership.

Speaker 2 California is wink-wink nudge-nudge allowing you to apply for concealed carry in multiple places. And then they don't staff the departments that do the interviews.
D.C.

Speaker 2 I came here to DC. I have firearms.
I'm a firearms owner. I inquired about the process.

Speaker 2 It's months before I can get an appointment with the chief of police or the police department to even apply to exercise my Second Amendment rights. Well, I'm exercised about that.

Speaker 2 I'm not happy about that. And I might be doing something about that.

Speaker 2 New York has a host of laws that that are different in upstate New York and different in New York City, and they all violate the Constitution.

Speaker 2 So we will be working together to make this a focus of the Civil Rights Division, challenging state law that violates fundamental civil rights in the Civil Rights Division.

Speaker 1 You know, I was doing a story today on Washington State. Washington state is...

Speaker 1 They've gone mad.

Speaker 1 They're insane.

Speaker 1 And they're doing a new Tesla tax because because Tesla's windfall profits need to be spent for the good of the population. I mean, it's like Marxist 101.

Speaker 1 But they also passed and signed into law, the governor,

Speaker 1 an emergency health act that if there's another pandemic, the governor will consult with, quote, scientific experts and can impose whatever the scientific experts say on the population.

Speaker 1 And when I saw that, I thought,

Speaker 1 no,

Speaker 1 I would move from Washington State.

Speaker 1 You've just lost all of your civil rights, all of your civil rights. They've already done it once under COVID.
Now they're codifying this.

Speaker 1 How does that fit in with you?

Speaker 2 What you guys do?

Speaker 2 Well, Glenn, I think I'm well known to your viewers and many others for the fact that during COVID, I filed more lawsuits than any other lawyer in the United States to challenge COVID restrictions.

Speaker 2 And I have told Congress,

Speaker 2 friends in Congress on multiple occasions, there's this one simple trick that they can use to make sure this never happens again.

Speaker 2 And that is legislatively overruling a case dating back to the beginning of the 20th century called Jacobson versus Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 Jacobson versus Massachusetts is a case involving a smallpox vaccine mandate in Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 And that case has been used in the modern era in the last five years to strip all of us of our civil rights.

Speaker 2 So when I hear about that decision you just mentioned, the new law, it doesn't matter because federal law and federal judges have already given state and even clowns like L.A.

Speaker 2 County's health official, who isn't even a doctor, the right to force 10 million people to stay in their homes, not get an education, not run their businesses, and not move about freely.

Speaker 2 That's outrageous. But Congress can fix that and Congress should fix that.

Speaker 2 And we should never again be under the thumb of this law that says that the state has police power to force you to take drugs. I don't think so.
Employers are allowed under

Speaker 2 guidance to do that right now too. We should change that.

Speaker 1 So are you happy with Congress though? Because I'm not real happy with Congress. You think their Congress is...

Speaker 1 I talked to the president on Wednesday and I said, You know, when are you going to put the law down on Congress with a hammer? And he's like, you know, they're doing a great job. Let's give them time.

Speaker 1 They've got to pass this big, beautiful bill. And I got the sense he was really still kind of negotiating and, you know, trying to make things work for this big, beautiful bill he's talking about.

Speaker 1 But I think Congress,

Speaker 1 I think the Republicans in Congress need to be shamed. I think he needs to take a big, beautiful hammer to their head and say, get to work.
What are you doing? Get to work.

Speaker 1 Because if they don't codify the things that he's put in, we're just going back to the way we were.

Speaker 2 Look, I'm not here to shame anybody. I had a conversation with a member of Congress earlier today, providing them with some information.
And I think most members of Congress are really well-meaning.

Speaker 2 Well-meaning is not enough at this point in

Speaker 2 our time

Speaker 2 in this

Speaker 2 trajectory of where we are as a country. But you have to do math, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, there's a certain number of people there, and what they can get done realistically, I think, is something that's on the heads of our leadership. So are they working long enough hours?

Speaker 2 Are they prioritizing the right things? I'm not a legislator. I never sought to be one at the federal level.
So I leave it to them.

Speaker 2 But any member of Congress can ask me what I think needs to be fixed with our civil rights laws. And I will happily offer my opinion on that as I've been doing for the last 30 plus years.

Speaker 1 What's the one thing that you got into office and you were like, oh my gosh, I never thought I'd see this. Is there anything?

Speaker 2 There's a few. I never thought I'd see 50-year-old consent decrees involving desegregation still being monitored by the United States Department of Justice.

Speaker 2 We dismissed one of those cases or filed the paperwork to dismiss the judges sitting on it and deciding what to do about it. What does that mean? That means that

Speaker 2 a court is monitoring or on paper monitoring desegregation in a southern state where the judge is gone, nobody is committing any discrimination that anybody's complaining about.

Speaker 2 And someone in the Department of Justice has it on their docket in my department to monitor this. And there's dozens of cases like that.
So we're finding all these old cases and dismissing them.

Speaker 2 There are cases, statistical cases brought against police departments that shouldn't be there. We're dismissing those cases.

Speaker 2 There's cases, there's a 1978 case involving police practices that the Department of Justice is still monitoring. None of the cops are there.
None of the supervisors are there.

Speaker 2 The judges aren't there. We're clinging to this case as part of our caseload.
That's absurd. So these things are getting, we're figuring out.

Speaker 2 Some lawyers, pet project, nobody wanted to be the lawyer who is dismissing a desegregation case or discrimination case i'm happy to do it i don't think it's just for the government to have its boot on the neck of a law-abiding law enforcement agency or school district i think we should be encouraging good behavior by dissolving and dismissing those unnecessary burdens and what

Speaker 2 kind of burden was imposed on those people reporting Reporting, you know, worrying about running afoul of some requirements, some special restrictions, having to get permission for certain things that you shouldn't have to do.

Speaker 2 These cases also occur in the voting rights area as well. The Republican National Committee was under a 30-year consent decree

Speaker 2 preventing them from getting involved in Election Day operations for no good reason. The only time that case went away is when the judge passed away and we were able to get another person to do that.

Speaker 2 So, you know,

Speaker 2 it becomes someone's pet project and then they cling to it and they don't want to give it up. And that's unjust.

Speaker 2 Our government should be there to enforce the laws, call the balls and strikes, but not sort of have some weaponized agenda that lasts for decades.

Speaker 2 I was shocked at the number of cases that we have against police departments based purely on tiny statistical differentials. 3%, 5%.

Speaker 2 We're bringing a case against police department because

Speaker 2 people are passing tests based on their racial characteristics at a 3% or a 5% differential. I'm sorry, that's junk science.
That doesn't barely even

Speaker 2 meet the margin of error, much less a case you go into court and handle. We have a department in my section that hasn't brought a case in court for years.
They send letters to people.

Speaker 2 and, you know, demand responses. Like there's no lawsuit there.
And we're not doing that anymore in the Civil Rights Division. If there's an investigation, we're going to investigate.

Speaker 2 We're going to either take action or we're going to close the investigation. We aren't going to let investigations linger on causing anxiety and stress for law-abiding people for years.

Speaker 2 You know, that was unjust to me.

Speaker 1 That was the thing that the Justice Department, I think, did, is they made the process the punishment. They just let it linger.

Speaker 1 I mean, when the Justice Department has you in their sights, And you know it and they say, we're coming for you. We're just, could you need to produce this and this?

Speaker 1 And, you know, we'll meet with you soon. Your whole life changes.
Your whole life changes. and the process becomes the punishment

Speaker 2 it does it does and what what what government lawyers i mean well-meaning i'm sure don't understand is when that other person got that letter they went and hired a lawyer that's ten thousand twenty thousand fifty thousand dollars and that lawyer keeps billing every month yeah as long as that investigation going and that's not a that's not a fault of the lawyer that's how the system is and the system is wrong so we're going to stop that you're either we're going to look into it if you're doing something wrong you're going to fix it, or we're going to stop harassing you.

Speaker 1 If you're a Christian, if you're a Muslim, if you're a Jew, I particularly think Jews are

Speaker 1 right in the chopping block and the firing line, especially in universities. What message do you have for them who feel like

Speaker 1 nobody's, I mean, this system is just crushing us?

Speaker 2 This United States Department of Justice has a a zero tolerance policy for violence or intimidation against any person of faith in the United States that prevents them from getting an education, worshiping freely, enjoying the right to buy a church, mosque, temple, gurdwara, and use that appropriately within federal law.

Speaker 2 And we venerate religion in our country in our Bill of Rights. It is a founding basis of our country, and we're very, very committed to it.
And so I'm personally committed to it.

Speaker 2 My entire career has been based on protecting religious liberty of all people of faith, winning three cases of the United States Supreme Court in recent years during COVID on these issues. And so

Speaker 2 that's a no-brainer, but there's so much more that we need to get done. I know people are chomping at the bit to see what are we going to do on election integrity issues.

Speaker 2 I don't have a portfolio that allows me as a federal official to go fix every election law problem in America. People have to understand we have a separation of powers.

Speaker 2 We have a balance of power in federalism. I'm sorry, guys, there's no shortcut.
Most of the hard work relating to election laws has to be done in the states.

Speaker 2 That's how our Constitution is set up, and that is how our laws are set up. You can't just elect one person in the White House and expect him to fix all your problems.

Speaker 2 What we can do is administer those election laws that we administer. What Congress needs to do is put some teeth into those election laws.

Speaker 2 Just yesterday, in a case that my team argued, a federal judge here in D.C.

Speaker 2 stopped the federal government from requiring voter ID.

Speaker 2 Voter ID is contemplated in our federal election laws and unfortunately it's not spelled out clearly enough and what the prior administrations have done is use the fact that it isn't spelled out clearly enough that states can require voter ID as a condition of voter registration is they said states can't require it because it isn't explicitly required.

Speaker 2 I've asked Congress, every member of Congress who asked me, hey, Hartmeet, what can we fix? Fix this. require voter ID explicitly in the statute if you if you want to stop complaining about it.

Speaker 2 So they need to go do that. And I've heard some cockamamie reasons why they can't.
I won't shame any particular congressman

Speaker 1 or senator about that. You're more than welcome to.

Speaker 2 That would not be fair. Those were confidential conversations, but I rolled my eyes as I'm describing them.
They can fix it. They need to fix it.

Speaker 2 And by the way, it is a very popular issue today in America. I think many Democrats are fed up to.

Speaker 2 It's 80%.

Speaker 1 It's an 73rd year, 80-20 issue.

Speaker 2 You know, people are a lot of, I mean,

Speaker 2 when we see the fallout of the new Act Baloo Executive Order, that's not my department.

Speaker 2 But when that fallout comes out, some of the things I've seen as an election lawyer in my private life are truly shocking, the abuses of the donation system.

Speaker 2 People are going to want to know that there's some check and balance on the right to vote here. The vote is a precious right and it shouldn't be given away to people who don't have a right to it.

Speaker 2 And one way to do that is voter ID.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much, Armit.

Speaker 1 It's always great to see you. You always fill me with hope.
We've talked about some pretty dark things in the years of knowing each other, and you are a champion of light, and I appreciate it.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. You bet.

Speaker 1 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.