Exclusive-US civil rights agency opens sweeping antisemitism probe

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By David Hood and Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A Democrat-led civil rights watchdog agency opened a sweeping investigation into how the federal government has responded to allegations of antisemitism on college campuses, a review that could bring a rare dose of official scrutiny to the Trump administration’s confrontations with Columbia and other universities.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, a bipartisan commission tasked with monitoring civil rights violations across the country and in government, has already rankled Trump administration officials for having Democrat Rochelle Garza as chairwoman. 

Now, with its wide-ranging requests for documents and communications between federal officials and the schools, seen by Reuters, the investigation has further riled administration officials and outside allies.

In addition to seeking a trove of documents from the schools, the commission is scheduled to hold public hearings in November with witnesses at the direction of its Democratic leaders, culminating in a report on its findings, due in about a year.

The commission, which includes four Democrats, three Republicans and an Independent, unanimously voted to begin the investigation in January, days before Trump took office.

And while it will scrutinize federal action dating back to the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while Joe Biden was president, the Trump administration’s response to claims of rampant antisemitism on America’s campuses will come under the microscope in ways that it has not yet. 

Just days into his presidency, Trump issued an executive order cracking down on antisemitism broadly, including how some student protests could be a pretext for investigation. 

Trump officials have used these allegations, disputed by university officials, to justify threats to withhold billions of dollars of federal funding while pressuring officials to sign legal agreements that experts in higher education say have undermined the traditional independence of private colleges and universities.

The investigation will examine those pressure campaigns at a time when Trump has reshaped most, if not all, federal bodies tasked with overseeing civil rights violations within the federal government. 

The administration has even tried, unsuccessfully, to wrest control of the commission by trying to supplant its Democratic leaders. A White House official confirmed that the administration had tried to install longtime Republican Commissioner Peter Kirsanow to chair the panel earlier this year.

“Members of the commission have been blocking this appointment from being confirmed and preventing the president’s agenda from being implemented,” the official said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

The commission was created as a part of the 1957 Civil Rights Act as a cross-government agency, independent from both Congress and the executive branch. 

Congress appoints four members and the other four are appointed by the president, serving six-year terms. The president has the power to designate the chair and vice chair, but it’s up to the commission to vote to install them. The president may remove a member of the commission only for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office,” according to the commission’s website. 

Trump’s actions against the colleges will be included in the investigation because the commission asked for all communications between the schools and any federal agency “regarding antisemitic conduct or conduct based on shared ancestry under Title VI,” according to documents seen by Reuters. 

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act specifically prohibits any program or activity that receives federal financial aid from discriminating based on race, color and national origin.

ABOUT A DOZEN INSTITUTIONS RECEIVED REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION

Formal requests for information, known as interrogatories, were sent to about a dozen colleges and universities, a source briefed on the investigation said. Among those were the University of Minnesota and Columbia University, according to interrogatories seen by Reuters.

Columbia University declined to comment about the probe. The University of Minnesota did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

To be sure, the commission did not begin its investigation earlier this year with the intent to focus on the Trump administration, according to meeting transcripts and the documents sent to the universities. 

The commission’s investigation began with a mandate from Congress to track the government’s response to campus antisemitism, “or lack thereof,” said Mondaire Jones, a Democratic member of the commission leading the probe. 

“This investigation by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is separate and apart from any of the actions in the name of combating antisemitism that the Trump administration has undertaken,” Jones said.

The commission’s requests for all communications between the federal government and the colleges could make it appear as though the group’s goal is to “spy” on the current administration’s ongoing probes into campus antisemitism, said Kendra Wharton, a former associate deputy attorney general and senior member of Trump’s legal defense team.

“The commission is clearly trying to gather confidential communications between the universities and the Department of Justice and the Department of Education which I think is unprecedented,” said Wharton, who represents some of the schools under investigation. “It puts everyone who’s having good faith communications with various federal agencies in a bad spot.”

The probe comes as Trump’s lieutenants disbanded the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education and have reoriented the mission of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to prioritize conservative agenda items like gun rights and anti-transgender ideologies. Since January, the division has lost almost 400 employees.

A DOJ spokesperson said the agency couldn’t comment because of the government shutdown, which limits the agency’s ability to respond to issues outside national security, violations of federal law and essential public safety functions. The Department of Education expressed similar sentiments, while the Department of Health and Human Services referred all questions to the White House.

The commission may be one of the last independent agencies overseeing civil rights within the administration, said Eve Hill, a partner at Brown, Goldstein and Levy. The commission’s independence is “essential” to hold any administration accountable for civil rights policies, she said.

“It (independence) allows them to be brave in calling out those negative impacts of some federal policies, and to be able to call any given administration to account for the things they’re doing that they haven’t thought all the way through,” said Hill, who also served as former deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

“And you just can’t do that if you’re politically tied to an administration,” she said.

(Reporting by David Hood-Nuño and Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Kat Stafford and Mark Porter)