| Speaker | Time | Text |
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First Amendment Fights
00:14:47
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| We strongly believe that all of the nine people who have been indicted so far by the grand jury had both violations. | ||
| They all went inside. | ||
| They all obstructed, harassed, intimidated, frightened. | ||
| People were actually injured in this melee. | ||
| And on top of that, they all planned to do it. | ||
| They met outside, and Don Lemon helpfully provided us with live stream video of planning, of him bringing donuts and coffee to the co-conspirators, of using the royal we repeatedly when he was talking about what we were going to go inside and what we were going to do. | ||
| He even turned off his microphone at one point to conceal what the co-conspirators were talking about doing. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ, my old friend and Twitter colleague, Harmeet Dhillon. | ||
| Harmeed, it's nice to see you. | ||
| Nice to see you too, Dave. | ||
| You know, although I've never hired you as a lawyer, I consider you my lawyer. | ||
| Is that strange? | ||
| You're basically the one person I call if I've got a legal question, and you do it for free. | ||
| I just want people to know that. | ||
| Like, you really care about all of this stuff. | ||
| So I'm just saying some nice things about you up, Top. | ||
| Well, I do it for free for you, Dave. | ||
| Let's not invite all your viewers to call me with their legal aid questions. | ||
| Fair, fair. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, it is great to see, again, obviously there is a lot to talk about here. | ||
| I suppose we should first dive in with some of this Don Lemon stuff indicted by a grand jury in Minnesota. | ||
| Does not go to jail, at least yet. | ||
| Some of this will be fought over. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit about the SAFE Act, why it was passed, how it pertains, how this case involving Don pertains not only to the worshippers' civil rights, the protesters' civil rights, and in this case, Don, who says he's a journalist. | ||
| And I just don't even know if that's a special protection anymore in an age where everybody holds cell phones. | ||
| Yeah, well, so first of all, I don't even think of this as the Don Lemon case. | ||
| I think of this as the Church Cities case. | ||
| And Don is one of many indicted individuals and many who are yet to be indicted who violated federal law in a couple of different ways. | ||
| So the FACE Act was passed in 1994. | ||
| Oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| I think I said SAFE Act. | ||
| That's the other thing going on with election integrity. | ||
| That's also a good law. | ||
| That's a good law, by the way, and I support it, but in my individual capacity. | ||
| But the FACE Act in 1994 was mainly passed to protect abortion clinics from being obstructed by pro-life protesters. | ||
| And the terms are defined broadly, so it also includes crisis pregnancy centers have come under that. | ||
| But this law wouldn't have passed without bipartisan support. | ||
| And so to get that bipartisan support, Congress added in a provision giving the same protections to houses of worship. | ||
| And there it lay dormant for over 30 years until my department and the DOJ under Pam Bondi brought the first DOJ FACE Act case regarding an attack on a synagogue in West Orange, New Jersey last year. | ||
| This is the second of our cases that we are bringing, the first criminal case that we are bringing. | ||
| And I have, I won't say how many, but numerous other cases under investigation, mainly involving attacks on synagogues. | ||
| Now, what the Biden DOJ pioneered, so a violation of the FACE Act is a first violation is a misdemeanor. | ||
| And then if you do more of them, it escalates to a felony. | ||
| The Biden DOJ prosecuted many, many pro-life protesters who prayed silently outside an abortion clinic. | ||
| Not what we're talking about here. | ||
| They didn't go in, live stream while an abortion is happening, put their mic in the face of the doctor performing the abortion or providing counseling to a pregnant woman. | ||
| Just by standing outside, you're seen as obstructing or intimidating or what have you. | ||
| And then they use the Klan Act, which is a much older, it's probably the oldest of the federal civil rights laws that I administer short of the Bill of Rights, that makes it a crime to intimidate and violate somebody's civil rights or conspire to do that, where two or more people conspire to violate somebody's civil rights. | ||
| And this dates back to the Reconstruction era in our country after the Civil War, where actually it was local and state law enforcement that was conspiring to prevent newly freed slaves from enjoying their full civil rights. | ||
| So that's how important and old that law is. | ||
| We call it the Klan Act, the Ku Klux Klan Act. | ||
| That's the shorthand for it. | ||
| So when you violate the Klan Act and you conspire to violate the rights that are protected by the FACE Act, you can be held liable for a felony under federal law. | ||
| And so that's what the Biden DOJ did repeatedly. | ||
| And I went to court to actually defend one of their prosecutions at the Court of Appeals. | ||
| And that's the law of the land now. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| You can apply higher sentencing if appropriate. | ||
| So to show that, though, you have to show somebody was planning and knew about it and had some knowledge of something that was about to happen or took part of it. | ||
| We strongly believe that all of the nine people who've been indicted so far by the grand jury had both violations. | ||
| They all went inside. | ||
| They all obstructed, harassed, intimidated, frightened. | ||
| People were actually injured in this melee. | ||
| And on top of that, they all planned to do it. | ||
| They met outside, and Don Lemon helpfully provided us with live stream video of planning, of him bringing donuts and coffee to the co-conspirators, of using the royal we repeatedly when he was talking about what we were going to go inside and what we were going to do. | ||
| He even turned off his microphone at one point to conceal what the co-conspirators were talking about doing. | ||
| We also see in that video an organized two-stage system where they first sent in a wave of, if you would call it, decoys who went and sat in the audience like other parishioners. | ||
| They were white. | ||
| Let's call them the white allies of this BLM protest, if you will. | ||
| And then when the people who kind of were the primary movers of catalyzing this protest came in, then everyone jumped up, frightened the hell out of people who came there to pray, over 400 people. | ||
| People were rushing for the exits. | ||
| Ladies fell and slipped on the ice. | ||
| People were prevented from getting their children from the Sunday school upstairs because they were blocked by these protesters. | ||
| Everyone's seen the calm demeanor of Pastor Jonathan Parnell. | ||
| And you can even see Don Lemon blocking someone from leaving while sticking a mic in his face. | ||
| These are all violations, clear violations of the law. | ||
| And we're going to prove that by pointing to the numerous prosecutions that have been done by prior departments of justice in these similar cases. | ||
| So, okay, so legally, you feel you have a tight case. | ||
| Now, what would you say to the people that would say, and you're hearing this across mainstream media right now, and plenty of it at the Grammys, but Don Lemon is a journalist. | ||
| And as a journalist, he was just on the ride with them. | ||
| He was just reporting on what was happening. | ||
| And he should have, in essence, some special protections. | ||
| Well, Don Lemon might have gone to the Learing School of Journalism, where they did not teach the distinctions in the First Amendment. | ||
| The First Amendment is not a license to violate other people's First Amendment rights. | ||
| He said, Oh, well, this is the First Amendment. | ||
| When the pastor said, This is shameful. | ||
| It is shameful that you came in here into this house of God and you brought your political things into this church. | ||
| And Don Lemon says, This is the First Amendment. | ||
| Well, no, the First Amendment, as you know, Dave, as we've discussed, has specific time, place, and manner restrictions. | ||
| You don't get to do your protest in a federal courthouse or in the post office, obstructing people from getting their mail or in the White House or, you know, even on certain sidewalks. | ||
| You have to get a permit if you're going to do things that obstruct and you have to give notice. | ||
| They didn't do any of that. | ||
| They treated this private property as a public park to conduct their protest. | ||
| And they did it to the exclusion of the intended purpose of that space, namely to worship God in the way that the followers of that church, city's church, are used to doing. | ||
| I mean, Pastor Parnell himself has eight children, and many of them were in that church that day. | ||
| He's terrified for his wife and his kids. | ||
| We see video of them pulling out at the end. | ||
| They're holding each other. | ||
| They're crying. | ||
| Let me say to the devil's advocate people who say, but he's a journalist. | ||
| Do we want to see this type of a scene with neo-Nazis doing a protest in a synagogue or people who dislike Islam doing a protest in a mosque? | ||
| Not everyone is going to be as peaceful and a mild servant of God as Jonathan Parnell. | ||
| There will be violence. | ||
| There will be anarchy. | ||
| There will be a retreat from houses of worship because people will be afraid to go there. | ||
| That is why we have a zero tolerance policy for this. | ||
| And that includes anybody who calls themselves a journalist but is obstructing, intimidating, threatening, and otherwise violating the FACE Act. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, the irony of the very same people who for years have been telling us they need safe spaces now not allowing for protected spaces for people to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech is rather extraordinary. | ||
| Let me ask you for a moment to take your lawyer hat off and your government hat off and just talk about this from an optics perspective. | ||
| Because one thing that I am sympathetic to is that perhaps now the government is just giving Lemon what he wants, which is his chance at martyrdom. | ||
| So this is separate than the legal issue. | ||
| This is more of an optics and narrative issue. | ||
| Does that jive with you in any way? | ||
| Well, it could, but now I'm going to give you another logical ploy, which is the slippery slope argument. | ||
| Now, several of the people arrested, Don Lemon happens to have his weirdo following. | ||
| That's fine, whatever. | ||
| Like, I respect the First Amendment. | ||
| As you know, I've represented numerous journalists, including people who disagree with me. | ||
| And I'm a former free speech lawyer in private practice. | ||
| Several of those people call themselves journalists. | ||
| What if they all call themselves journalists? | ||
| What if all of the people who want to disrupt an abortion clinic, a mosque, a synagogue, a church, a gurdwara, a Hindu mandar, what if they want to go in there and say, hey, we're all journalists? | ||
| Let's put a little journalism badge, you know, just like all these phonies put a service animal jacket on their dogs and just say, hey, I'm a journalist today. | ||
| I get a free pass to violate your First Amendment rights in the place you go for sanctuary. | ||
| That's where this argument will extend to. | ||
| I don't care if he's a journalist or I'm not disputing that. | ||
| He was once employed by CNN. | ||
| Some people tune in to see what he has to say. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's not relevant to whether he broke the law. | ||
| And let me point you to the examples of numerous examples by the prior administration of prosecuting people who call themselves journalists. | ||
| The Obama administration prosecuted people who are indisputably journalists, including, or I would say, prosecutor investigators, Cheryl Atkinson and James Rosen. | ||
| The last DOJ did not prosecute, but raided, harassed, and caused to spend possibly millions of dollars in attorneys' fees, Project Veritas for the thought crime of not publishing Ashley Biden's diary. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So those are, I didn't make the rules, but the rules are, and the Congress made these rules. | ||
| There's no get out of jail free card. | ||
| This is not monopoly for podcasters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And by the way, when everyone is, when no one's a journalist, everyone's a journalist. | ||
| And when everyone's a journalist, no one's a journalist. | ||
| And that I don't think John, I don't think Don Lemon is any more of a journalist. | ||
| And you're right than any of these other people that could have walked in there with the phone. | ||
| Let me ask you something broadly on the state of protests in the country, because it seems to me that whether it's BLM one day or Hamas stuff the next day or anti-ICE stuff or whatever it is, that we've just accepted that on any given moment in any usually blue city, people can just take over the streets. | ||
| You mentioned that there are places that you can't protest or you have to get dispensation from the government. | ||
| You have to get some sort of allowance in essence. | ||
| But it seems to me that doesn't really matter. | ||
| I mean, I understand that that's the law in a lot of places, but you can just walk down Fifth Avenue with thousands of people holding up Palestinian flags and just stop commerce, stop ambulances from going through and everything else. | ||
| Do you feel that the ship has just sailed on that, that these people just have free reign now to do whatever they want? | ||
| Well, you know, it's a very good question. | ||
| It's a one-way ratchet. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And over the years, I have advised numerous, I've participated in protests myself. | ||
| I've done that from childhood, actually. | ||
| There are things I believe strongly about. | ||
| And my, you know, people around me may have or in college or what have you. | ||
| You go out there and you protest legally and you follow orders and you then leave. | ||
| But here's what it is. | ||
| BLM had a 100,000 person protest march in Los Angeles during COVID. | ||
| There was no permit for 100,000 people to shut down traffic in Los Angeles. | ||
| At the same time, I went to court to litigate Gavin Newsom's denial of a permit to protest on the lawn of California's capital for a congressional candidate sought that, and someone protesting the state's refusal to issue gun licenses, federal firearms licenses, sorry, not federal firearms licenses, but gun training permits during that time period. | ||
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Challenging One-Sided Enforcement
00:06:31
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| And they were denied. | ||
| And you know what they did? | ||
| They honored that denial and they went to court to challenge it. | ||
| But the other side of the street, I guess COVID did not matter if it's a BLM protest. | ||
| There's a magic shield, just like if you're Don Lemon, you claim you're a journalist, that's a magic shield from liability. | ||
| So it is unfortunate that we have one-sided enforcement of our laws. | ||
| When young conservatives wanted to have certain speakers at UC Berkeley, they applied for permission. | ||
| There was going to be a protest over the denial. | ||
| They went and tried to get a permit. | ||
| And the other side just comes with bats and knives and nunchucks and starts a melee. | ||
| And somehow, because liberal cities have been trained by the DOJ Civil Rights Division over the years, that if you enforce the law, you're going to get in trouble as a cop or as a city. | ||
| And so I don't blame them in a way. | ||
| When this lawlessness occurs, they've been trained to stand down. | ||
| I mean, I saw it myself in a 2016 rally for then-candidate Trump. | ||
| I was in San Jose. | ||
| I did the Pledge of Allegiance. | ||
| I met the future president backstage. | ||
| Everyone is exiting peacefully, and suddenly a riot comes along. | ||
| There are 200 riot police standing there. | ||
| And by the way, I love the police. | ||
| These people are risking their lives for us. | ||
| I don't think they went into policing to stand there and watch taxpayers get beaten by a mob. | ||
| But when I sued the city, that is what I learned. | ||
| I learned that their crowd control practices are such that if that kind of thing happens and it only happens on one side for the most part, they just stand there and watch while citizens get beaten and nothing happens. | ||
| No one gets arrested. | ||
| That's the state of the law in some of our blue cities in the United States, many of them. | ||
| In fact, it is a dirty secret. | ||
| And people need to be aware that when you're going into these types of situations where a protest could break out, you're on your own. | ||
| Everyone make an exit plan for how they're going to get their family safely out of there. | ||
| And my goodness, are we going to start saying that about going to church now? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That everyone should have an ice-free, I mean, not the ice with the uniformers, but literally the ice that people slipped on when they were running out in Minnesota to try to get away. | ||
| Should everyone have a safety plan or an exit strategy in case a journalist brings a protest into your worship service? | ||
| That is just not sustainable in this country that was founded on the principles of freedom of religion. | ||
| So if the blue cities and states are not going to do anything about that, and if the previous DOJ told them, you know, you can just kind of told the police don't do much or get away with whatever you want or let the governors do nothing or whatever it might be. | ||
| I mean, you're involved now. | ||
| We have a much better DOJ now. | ||
| To me, it's almost as if they want you guys to overreact so that they can say, ah, see, Trump is that crazy authoritarian. | ||
| But if you guys don't do anything, we just leave the cities to the jackals. | ||
| Well, no, that's true. | ||
| And so, you know, what's happening on the immigration enforcement side, that's not my lane. | ||
| And I think the people, I mean, I met Tom Holman last week in Minneapolis with the Attorney General and others, and Chris Rea, the number two, the co-deputy at the FBI. | ||
| These are tremendous professionals. | ||
| I highly respect them. | ||
| You know, sometimes mistakes are made that the DOJ does investigate. | ||
| And so, you know, normally law enforcement looks at that. | ||
| But I will tell you that what we are seeing here is there is a shift and we're getting attacked for it. | ||
| So it's just damned if you do, damned if you don't. | ||
| I don't think, and I don't really care. | ||
| As you know, Dave, I'm not here for a popularity contest. | ||
| I'm very plain spoken. | ||
| I do what I think is right and damn the torpedoes. | ||
| And that is really the attitude, I think, of this president as well. | ||
| So, yes, someone may get their 15 minutes of fame. | ||
| They may get off on being arrested, whatever. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| But what we can't tolerate is a repeat of what we saw. | ||
| That is why we acted so swiftly. | ||
| I am a person of faith. | ||
| I think everyone should be able to go to their temple, church, synagogue, and feel safe there for a couple of hours, ever how long you're there, send your kids to Sunday school there. | ||
| We can't tolerate any of this protest coming into our houses of worship. | ||
| If we do, we will have lost the ability to worship peacefully in this country because I guarantee you that every provocateur is going to be live streaming their nonsense from a place with a captive audience of God-fearing people who won't fight back. | ||
| Of course, they won't fight back in front of an altar. | ||
| Like, what, you know, that's just not done. | ||
| We all have our instincts. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So it was a hostage situation, really. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| It also strikes me that we've already ceded so much ground to them. | ||
| We know that they can just take over malls whenever they want. | ||
| As I said, they can take over Fifth Avenue whenever they want. | ||
| So if we just concede this last Thing. | ||
| That's the irony, watching the women of the view defending this. | ||
| And as you pointed out, it's like, man, if a couple people in MAGA hats showed up at a mosque, you guys would be screaming your heads off. | ||
| It's quite, quite absurd. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Let me ask you, just more broadly speaking, now that you're a year or so into this new gig, everyone talks about the swamp and draining the swamp and all of these things. | ||
| What have been the challenges for you outside of the obvious legal cases, but just kind of reforming a Justice Department that I think we would both agree certainly that was a little out of whack, let's say for the last four years? | ||
| Oh, totally out of whack. | ||
| And not for the last four years. | ||
| I'm going to tell you, it's been out of whack for 40 years. | ||
| And no matter who was the president of the United States, it didn't matter. | ||
| Literally, same people were borrowed in here, totally like the very epitome of the deep state. | ||
| Things in the corners that you never want to talk about, you know, of this building. | ||
| And so when I came in here, it was like, you know, cleaning the GN stables. | ||
| You know, we just basically said, look, these are the president's priorities, and we're going to enforce all of the federal civil rights laws, but with these priorities. | ||
| That caused more than half the people working here to head for the exits, including some who'd been here for four decades and I think even five decades. | ||
| And that's not a bad thing. | ||
| But the challenge is you still have to enforce the law. | ||
| And then you have to find new people to come in and do that. | ||
| And you have to find new good people who want to come to DC and do a job. | ||
|
Protecting Service Members
00:07:53
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| And typically for a lawyer, it's a pay cut to come to D.C. and do this job. | ||
| It's a very prestigious job. | ||
| It's a very important job. | ||
| I find it a very rewarding job, but it is a challenge to staff in that circumstance. | ||
| I think today I may have had half a dozen hit pieces by the national news media across my inbox. | ||
| They harass our employees. | ||
| They reach out to us, our lawyers. | ||
| They make up lies. | ||
| The former lawyers who quit and now are having FOMO because we have done so much exciting work and in the headlines, they make up lies. | ||
| They breach their ethical duties and reveal attorney-client communications. | ||
| So these are some of the disappointing things I've seen. | ||
| One of the others is when I started as a lawyer over three decades ago, you could count on no matter who appointed the judge, you're going to get some baseline consistency and adherence to the laws. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I practiced law in San Francisco for 25 years, one of the most left-wing places, but I honestly got a fair shake from most of those judges most of the time. | ||
| I did not feel like, oh my gosh, I should just like pack up my tent and leave because of who appointed these judges. | ||
| That was not the case. | ||
| Today, what we saw during the last administration is some really radical judges joined the bench and to the point where they get slapped down on the same issue again and again and again by the Court of Appeals. | ||
| They don't respect the Court of Appeals. | ||
| They don't respect Supreme Court precedent. | ||
| They write like tone poems instead of opinions. | ||
| They're some nutty opinions that have come out. | ||
| And so it's really hard because the law is supposed to be something where it's like a machine. | ||
| You should be able to predict what the outcome is going to be based on clearly established norms. | ||
| It's not like a machine. | ||
| It's more like a slot machine now, where you plug it in and you don't know what's going to happen. | ||
| I mean, you could hit the jackpot or you could just go home broke. | ||
| That is the current situation. | ||
| Now, that is frustrating. | ||
| It doesn't have to be that way. | ||
| We're not going to accept it being that way. | ||
| We kind of need to get some more of the judges confirmed and on the bench so that we can have kind of a back to a normal judiciary that isn't biased against one side or the other. | ||
| Is that the only way to fix it through just getting more of Trump's judges confirmed? | ||
| And I guess what's the holdup on that? | ||
| But also, is there anything you really can't do anything with a true activist judge, right? | ||
| I mean, once they're sworn in, there's virtually nothing that can happen to stop them, right? | ||
| I mean, they can keep just giving terrible rulings, and it is what it is. | ||
| For the most part, I mean, I don't really want to stray into the other branches of the government, but of course, there are tools that Congress has to deal with people who are truly violating their oath. | ||
| You ought to be careful with that and judicious about it because you don't want that being abused either. | ||
| But I think others have spoken to the slow pace of confirmations, and I think that that issue is well known, what the problem is. | ||
| So I'll just leave it at that. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| What else are you focused on right now? | ||
| I mean, I think most people see the lemon thing seems to be the thing, as annoying as it is. | ||
| Obviously, there's all sorts of protest-related stuff, things of that nature. | ||
| What are the other places that you're kind of looking at? | ||
| Anything sort of surprise you in this year? | ||
| Well, you know, the church protest issue is really just, I shouldn't even call it a protest. | ||
| Church obstruction issue is last couple of weeks, really. | ||
| We have seen a significant increase on attacks on houses of worship and anti-Semitism in our country. | ||
| That is a big focus and has been in this administration. | ||
| I've had to, unfortunately, visit several synagogues that have been attacked by, you know, violent mobs, and we are investigating those and hope to be announcing some actions there pretty soon. | ||
| But there's so many other things that we cover, Dave. | ||
| I'm passionate about the Second Amendment. | ||
| I'm a gun owner here in the District of Columbia, and I'd love to have an AR-15 here in the District of Columbia, but I can't yet. | ||
| So we've sued the district over that issue. | ||
| We've sued Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for slow-rolling concealed carry permits. | ||
| We filed numerous briefs in the Supreme Court to support our Second Amendment rights. | ||
| That is something brand new that this DOJ did, this administration did under Pam Bondi and President Trump. | ||
| I'm really excited to be part of that. | ||
| We have been more active than I think any other Republican administration in history with respect to voting issues as well, getting involved in several cases. | ||
| I personally signed off on suing 25 states, including the District of Columbia as a jurisdiction, 24 states and the District of Columbia. | ||
| And we've reached settlements with several jurisdictions. | ||
| We have supported Wyoming's voter ID law successfully in court. | ||
| We've reached an agreement for North Carolina to clean up its inaccurate and bloated voter rolls. | ||
| We've supported the Fulton County ballot effort for the 2020 ballots with civil litigation. | ||
| That's now been handled in a criminal process as well. | ||
| And we have a bunch of other things on the horizon, but some of the other stuff that we do here is also very important. | ||
| I am passionate about the rights of the disabled. | ||
| We've got a big case against Uber for discriminating against blind riders, people with either sight disability and or seeing eye dogs. | ||
| I mean, they get mistreated by that company. | ||
| We protect our service members. | ||
| Our service members have special rights under federal law that they and their spouses have some mobility rights to move around and have licenses wherever they are. | ||
| They also are protected from arbitrary plan terminations, lease termination fees, and things like that. | ||
| So we've gone to bat for them. | ||
| I'm in charge for the government of helping to spearhead the elimination of DEI in public hiring and in education. | ||
| That's a huge project. | ||
| We have negotiated half a billion dollars in settlements for just a handful of the America's top institutions, and we are continuing to march forward and go after those. | ||
| And there are probably 10 other things that I've forgotten in that long sentence. | ||
| I wanted to end actually on the DEI stuff. | ||
| So if we could do that just for two minutes. | ||
| So, okay, so it seems like we're dismantling DEI in the institutions, although it also seems like a lot of the colleges and maybe corporations, they're just sort of rebranding it. | ||
| They're not calling it DEI anymore. | ||
| They're renaming departments. | ||
| They're just shifting people around. | ||
| I mean, once you guys get the initial win, okay, this institution got rid of DEI, do you just walk away at that point and hope that it's going to work out? | ||
| Or do you have the ability to keep your eye on them in a way to make sure that they're not constantly changing? | ||
| Well, we do have that ability. | ||
| So the good news is that every time the federal government gives a dollar to a recipient, that agency has the right to go in and then follow up and make sure that the grant conditions are being met, which always include following federal law. | ||
| Well, federal law now, not just according to this administration, but the Supreme Court, is that you can't discriminate in hiring or in admissions on the basis of race and other protected characteristics. | ||
| So we always have the right. | ||
| Maybe they're going to do a deal and then wink, wink, nudge, nudge, they backslide. | ||
| We can open up a new investigation there. | ||
| So we don't let them get away with it. | ||
| Harmeet, I wish we had more time. | ||
| I hope we can do this as many more times as you'd like to during your tenure at the DOJ and then well beyond that. | ||
| You know, you and I, I feel like we're like old souls in this internet fight. | ||
| So it's just a joy to see you doing what you're doing. | ||
| And I hope to see you soon. | ||
| Thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| If you're craving more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, check out our politics playlist right here. | ||