It’s only been a week since Harmeet Dhillon became the first high-profile departure from the Trump administration after last week’s GOP midterm drubbing, and already the former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division says she’s living a “completely different life.”
Dhillon, who crusaded against diversity, equity, and inclusion during her 18 months in office, is now on the outside, free to take a vacation in Puerto Rico—where she was when I called her Wednesday—and able to talk more freely than she could as a government official.
When my colleague Eli Lake interviewed Dhillon last year, she argued that the Justice Department is not a “quasi-independent” branch, as many legal theorists suggest. “It isn’t,” she said. “It’s an instrumentality of the executive branch. We got to do the job that the president wants done within the bounds of the statutory authority, like everybody else.”
Yet after resigning from the Justice Department last week, does she now worry that the Trump administration has gone too far in pursuing the president’s perceived enemies, and that last week’s blue tsunami may have signaled a need for a course correction on that front?
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