By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer
A top Department of Justice official, Harmeet Dhillon, said Thursday she is resigning from her position and that she was asked to wait to step down until after the midterms.
Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a post on X Thursday that he accepted Dhillon’s resignation and added that she “has defended the civil liberties of every American and enforced the law without fear or favor.”
“The department is grateful for her dedicated public service,” he wrote, “and we wish her every success in her future endeavors.”
Confirming her departure to Fox News, Dhillon said that she “wasn’t asked to resign.” She had served as the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.
“I resigned three weeks ago, and Susie asked me to please wait until after the midterms,” she said, referring to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff.
Dhillon said in a Fox interview that she told Wiles three weeks before the midterm elections that she “accomplished everything” she set out to do in the agency and wanted to return to her private law practice.
“My decision, my choice,” she said, further explaining why she is leaving. “It’s time.”
Before she was confirmed in the Senate to join the DOJ, she founded the Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty. She is also a former vice chair of the California Republican Party and Republican national committeewoman for California.
In her tenure as the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Dhillon sought to reorient it to focus on protecting the rights of gun owners as well as ending diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, at universities and other organizations.
Dhillon in September also ended more than 50 decades-old desegregation cases across the United States and said that those cases were “onerous and outdated consent decrees” that were still being funded.
“In this administration, we are ending prolonged federal oversight of these school districts because the effort does not reflect the reality of those classrooms today,” she said in a statement at the time.
The announcement from Dhillon on Thursday is the first publicly confirmed top DOJ departure since Tuesday’s midterm elections, which handed significant losses to the Republican Party in Congress.
The DOJ announced another significant personnel departure on Thursday in a court filing. Henry Whitaker, who worked as top DOJ aide and litigator, will be “imminently leaving the government for another opportunity,” he wrote in the filing, with no other details provided about why.
“The United States will continue to be represented in these cases by R. Trent McCotter,” he wrote.
Last month, Dhillon defended the Trump administration’s recent efforts to root out noncitizen voting during a “60 Minutes” interview
“There are people who feel that the point is to sow distrust about the whole election system. There are very few people who are noncitizens who end up voting. … What’s the purpose?” Lesley Stahl, the host of the CBS program, asked Dhillon.
She responded by saying: “The point is actually the opposite of what you were saying. It’s not to sow distrust. The distrust is there. And so, all of these kinds of crimes are being prosecuted now for the first time really, in volume. And look, even the Biden administration prosecuted 13 people for noncitizen voting.”
Later on, Dhillon said, “We’ve had investigations ongoing for over a year, and it takes time. There are literally thousands of them out there that we are looking at.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
