Nine former Justice Department lawyers appointed to investigate anti-Semitism allegations at the University of California told the Times they felt pressured to conclude that the campus violated the civil rights of Jewish students and employees, describing confusion and hasty direction from the Trump administration.
In interviews over several weeks, career lawyers who have worked together for decades said they were instructed at the beginning of the case. All nine lawyers resigned while on assignment at the University of California, although some feared they were being asked to violate ethical standards.
“Originally, we were told we only had 30 days to find cause to be prepared to sue UC,” said Ejaz Baruch, a former senior trial attorney tasked with investigating whether Jewish UCLA faculty members faced discrimination on campus that the university did not adequately address. “This shows how disingenuous this exercise was. It did not attempt to find out what actually happened.”
In the spring of 2024, UCLA found itself in trouble as protests against Israel’s war in Gaza became increasingly violent. UCLA’s Anti-Semitism Task Force found “widespread awareness of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias on campus” among Jews. Mr. A sued UCLA for violating his civil rights and won millions of dollars and concessions.
Although UCLA avoided a trial, the lawsuit, along with articles on conservative websites such as the Washington Free Beacon, formed the basis of the UC investigation, former Justice Department lawyers said.
“UCLA came closest to breaking the law in how it responded to and handled civil rights complaints from Jewish employees,” Baruch said. “We had enough information from our investigation to sue UCLA,” Barouch said, but “we believed there were significant weaknesses in these cases.”
“It’s even clearer to me that it turned out to be a fraudulent and bogus investigation,” said another lawyer.
A Justice Department spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. When announcing the findings of the investigation into UCLA in late July, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, said the campus “failed to take timely and appropriate action in response to credible allegations of harm and hostility on campus.” Dillon said there was a “clear violation of federal civil rights law.” Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said UCLA “will pay a heavy price.”
Accounts of activities in the Trump administration by former Justice Department lawyers provide a rare look inside the government’s investigation of the Unification Church. In recent months, university officials have said little publicly about ongoing discussions with the Justice Department. Their strategy was to tread carefully and negotiate to end the investigation and financial blackmail out of court without further jeopardizing the $17.5 billion in federal funds the University of California receives.
The four lawyers said they were particularly troubled by two issues. First, they were asked to write a “j-memo” explaining why the University of California should face the lawsuit “before we even knew the facts,” one lawyer said.
“Then there was a PR campaign,” the attorney said, referring to the announcement starting Feb. 28, 2025, in which investigators would visit UCLA, UC Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and seven other universities across the country because of “anti-Semitic incidents on campus since October 2023.”
“I’ve gone through multiple presidential administrations and never once did they send out a press release essentially claiming that a workplace or university was guilty of discrimination before we investigated whether there was, in fact, discrimination,” said one lawyer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“Virtually everything about the UC investigation was unusual,” said Jen Swedish, former deputy chief of the employment discrimination team that worked on the UCLA case.
“Political appointees effectively determined the outcome of the investigation almost before it began,” Sweden said, referring to Trump administration officials who publicly declared that punishing universities for anti-Semitism was a priority. She resigned in May.
The lawyers spoke out because their official relationship with the Justice Department recently ended. Many said they believed it was an aggressive and politically motivated action by the Trump administration against the University of California and other elite U.S. campuses that undermined the integrity of the faculty.
“I think there were definitely Jews on campus who faced legitimate discrimination, but the way the investigation was being pushed so hard it was clear to many that this was a political gig that wasn’t actually helping anyone,” said one lawyer who worked at UC Davis and UC Los Angeles and met with students.
A University of California spokesperson said in a statement: “While we cannot speak to the practices of the Department of Justice, the University of California continues to act in good faith and in the best interests of our students, staff, faculty, and patients. We are focused on solutions that keep the University of California strong for Californians and Americans.”
The government has not sued UC.
But in August, the Justice Department required the university to pay a $1.2 billion fine and agree to overhaul its conservative-leaning campus policies to resolve federal anti-Semitism charges. In return, the Trump administration would recover $584 million. At the time, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the proposal “extortion.”
Last month, the U.S. school district ruled that the “coercive and retaliatory” offer violated the First Amendment after University of California teachers filed their own lawsuit. Lin blocked demands for fines and major changes to the campus.
“University officials, presidents, and vice presidents have repeatedly publicly announced strategies to launch civil rights investigations into prominent universities in order to justify cuts in federal funding with the goal of forcing universities to buckle and change their ideological course,” Lin said.
Her ruling does not prevent the University of California from negotiating with the administration or reaching other agreements with President Trump.
Spring 2024: Protest demonstrations cause chaos on campus
The federal investigation focused primarily on raucous pro-Palestinian campus protests that erupted on the University of California campus. On April 30, 2024, pro-Israel vigilantes attacked a UCLA encampment, injuring student and faculty activists. Police engaged in an hours-long melee that former president Gene Block called a “dark chapter” in the university’s history.
During the 2023-2024 UC protests, some Jewish students and faculty complained of a hostile climate, and formal anti-Semitism complaints against the school increased. Some Jews said they were harassed for being Zionists. At protests and encampments, some people encountered symbols and chants such as “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which some deemed anti-Semitic. Jews were also among the main activists in the concentration camp movement.
In June 2024, Jewish students and faculty at UCLA sued the University of California, accusing the camp of blocking access to Dixon Court and Royce Quad. The four accused the university of anti-Semitic discrimination that enabled pro-Palestinian activists to protest. On July 29, 2025, UC agreed to pay $6.45 million to settle the federal lawsuit.
In response to the demonstrations and lawsuits, the university instituted a free speech policy that prohibits protests without prior approval from large swathes of campus. The group said it agreed to strictly enforce existing bans on night camping and the use of masks to conceal one’s identity while violating the law, and not to ban Jews and other legally protected groups from entering campuses.
Inside the investigation
Between January and June, nine former Justice Department lawyers investigated whether the University of California campus mishandled anti-Semitic complaints filed by Jewish students, faculty and staff associated with pro-Palestinian causes. They were involved in employment litigation and educational opportunity, two areas of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division tasked with investigating potential discrimination faced by University of California employees and students.
Lawyers described a sometimes rushed process that focused legal staff on investigating anti-Semitism on UC campuses and harmed other discrimination cases focused on racial minorities and people with disabilities.
At one point, more than half of the employment litigation division’s dozen lawyers were assigned exclusively or almost exclusively to UC campuses, and some were specifically directed to investigate UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and other campus divisions, lawyers said. Lawyers said additional staff were brought in from other Justice Department teams specializing in tax law and immigrant employment law as lawyers began to leave.
In mid-spring, five lawyers reported minimal findings at the Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco campuses, so they were reassigned to UCLA.
“UCLA, like the private school Harvard, was the crown jewel of the public universities that the Trump administration wanted to ‘capture,’” said another lawyer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation for his comments. “There were meetings where our fellow general managers told political appointees and even the White House that they wanted us all at UCLA.”
Dena Robinson, a former senior trial attorney, investigated campuses in Berkeley, Davis and Los Angeles.
“I am a person who volunteered to participate in the investigation, and I did so out of lived experience. I am a black woman and I am Jewish,” she said. But she expressed concern about deadlines changing quickly. “And I’m very skeptical that this administration actually cares about Jews and anti-Semitism.”
Lawyers described similar observations and patterns at the Division of Educational Opportunity, where UC’s investigation was occurring at the same time.
A tenth attorney, Amelia Huckins, said she resigned from the department to avoid being assigned to the University of California.
“I didn’t want to be part of a team that required me to make arguments that were inconsistent with the law and existing case law,” she said.
Huckins had been out of work for more than two months when she read the July 29 finding that UCLA acted with “deliberate indifference” toward Jewish students and staff and threatened to sue the university if a settlement was not reached.
Among these findings, the Justice Department stated that “Jewish and Israeli students at UCLA were subjected to severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive harassment by members of the camp that created a hostile environment.” As evidence, it cited 11 complaints from Jewish or Israeli students about discrimination between April 25 and May 1, 2024.
“It was as if they had only spoken to certain students and used public documents, such as media reports,” Huckins said, adding that the evidence presented publicly seemed thin. In a “routine investigation,” attorneys will examine “various tiers of requests for documents and data, and interviews at all levels of the university system.” These investigations could take at least a year, if not longer, she said.
What the investigators encountered
Lawyers described site visits conducted at several UC campuses this spring, including meetings with campus administrators, civil rights officials, police chiefs, and UC attorneys who were present during the interviews, including a meeting with UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk.
Lawyers say University of California leaders were cooperative and shared information detailing campus policies on how to handle civil rights complaints and how to handle specific cases of faculty members who say they were harassed.
“There were thousands of pages of documents and many interviews,” Baruch said, referring to Barclay and Davis. “While there may have been some harassment here and there, it hasn’t really risen to the level where the university would violate federal law. That’s a pretty high bar.”
“We identified certain incidents in Berkeley and Davis that were kind of flashpoints. There were some protests that seemed to get out of hand. There were encampments, there was graffiti. But we didn’t see a truly hostile work environment,” said another attorney who visited those campuses. “And if there was a hostile environment, it appears to have improved by the end of 2024, or even by May or June.”
But at UCLA, Barouch said he and his team found that “there were problems with the complaint system and that some professors were truly being harassed, to a level so severe that it violated Title VII.” Ultimately, “we were successful in convincing the front office that we should only go after UCLA,” he said.
Today’s position of the University of California and the Trump administration
When Harvard University faced massive grant freezes and civil rights violations, it sued the Trump administration. The University of California has so far not chosen to go to court, saying it is open to ongoing investigations and “dialogue” to resolve the threats.
“Our priorities are clear: protect the University of California’s ability to educate students, conduct research in the interest of California and the nation, and provide quality health care,” said University of California spokeswoman Rachel Zaentz. “While we approach dialogue in good faith, we will not accept outcomes that undermine UC’s core mission or undermine taxpayer investment.”
According to UC sources, the math is simple. The University of California has too much federal funding, and they want to avoid a head-on conflict with President Trump. They point to Harvard University, which publicly challenged the president and suffered significant grant losses and federal restrictions on patents and international student admissions.
“Our strategy so far has been to lay low and avoid Mr. Trump as much as possible,” said a University of California official who was not authorized to speak on the record. “After the UCLA grant was withdrawn and the settlement was received, tactics changed to ‘playing nice’ without agreeing to its terms.”
“The stakes are huge,” UCLA President James B. Milliken said in a public appearance before UCLA’s Board of Regents last month, presenting data on the funding challenges. More than 1,600 federal subsidies were cut under the Trump administration. Even after winning in teachers’ court, about 400 grants worth $230 million remained suspended.
The University of California “still faces a potential loss of more than $1 billion in federal research funding,” Milliken said.
“The coming months may require even tougher choices across universities,” he said.
Information regarding a possible settlement between UC and Trump has not been made public. But some former Justice Department lawyers said they believed a settlement was inevitable.
“It’s devastating that these institutions feel pressured and bullied into these agreements,” Huckins said of the agreements with , , and other campuses. “I wish more schools would stand up to the administration…I know that schools are in a difficult situation.”
For Baruch, who handled the UCLA case, the Justice Department appeared to have the upper hand.
“Subsidy cuts are a huge blow to universities, and a multibillion-dollar fine is a steep sum. I can see why these universities are feeling the pinch and are restless,” he said. “The threat is working.”
