Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon says federal and state officials could face criminal conspiracy charges for allegedly targeting Donald Trump and his supporters in violation of civil rights.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said this week that federal and local officials involved in prosecutions against President Donald Trump and his supporters could face civil rights-related legal consequences if the Department of Justice determines there was a coordinated effort to deprive them of their constitutional protections.
“The Department of Justice is at the heart of considering these issues right now, so I can’t really talk about the specifics, but in general terms, yes,” Dhillon said during an appearance on the Just the News, No Noise television program, according to a report by Just the News.
The remarks followed a series of newly declassified emails revealing that the FBI’s Washington Field Office warned it “did not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar-a-Lago.” Nonetheless, the Biden Department of Justice proceeded with the August 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, amid internal objections. The FBI’s concerns were first detailed in a report by Fox News, which noted that political pressure was exerted on the Bureau from higher levels of the DOJ.
Dhillon explained that DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has jurisdiction under long-standing federal criminal statutes that were originally crafted to address conspiracies against individuals’ rights, dating back to the Reconstruction era and the early days of combating Ku Klux Klan activity.
“The Civil Rights Division and the DOJ generally do have the tool of a criminal conspiracy statute for conspiracy against rights, and this dates back to the start of the Ku Klux Klan, and when the Klan and its predecessors used to go after people, and they could involve, sometimes local law enforcement to do that,” she said. “And so we have the ability, if we can prove a conspiracy to violate someone’s civil rights, that that could be a criminal matter.”
Addressing the broader implications of the possible legal action, Dhillon said the department was also evaluating other mechanisms to hold violators accountable beyond federal officials.
“And so these cases are rare and few and far between, but it has been something that we have been looking at in a few different fact patterns in this Department of Justice, including numerous instances of state officials violating federal rights,” she said. “In this case, the allegation is that federal officials violated federal rights and the other tools that could include Office of Inspector General inspections here at the Department of Justice.”
She also addressed potential consequences for attorneys and federal employees who may have breached professional or constitutional obligations in the course of these prosecutions.
“That also goes for lawyers who leak and betray confidence as a breach of privilege, and for people who violate their oath as attorneys, they could also face bar sanctions if there’s a bar referral after an investigation like that,” Dhillon said.
“So, I would say all of those things are on the table for lawyers and DOJ officials and others who conspired with them at the state level, state prosecutors, state police and so forth, who conspired to violate civil rights,” she continued. “And it could also include executive branch officials from the first administration who knowingly conspired and orchestrated a violation of federal civil rights.”
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