In a new interview released on Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Civil Rights division, Harmeet Dhillon, gave her take on the Justice Department filing suit this week against Orange County, California, for allegedly failing to uphold U.S. voter laws. I’ll get to that in a minute.
Of course, the team in the DOJ can walk and chew gum at the same time. Case in point (no pun intended), as my colleague Katie Jerkovich wrote just over a week back, the department agreed to take up the legal situation of a Washington state coach whose employer (Washington U.) allegedly fired him because he refused to take the COVID shot on religious grounds.
It comes just one day after the Trump Department of Education and ED Secretary Linda McMahon told California its schools are not holding up their end of the bargain on following Title IX, in providing fairness in sports for girls and in women’s spaces:
In the press release posted on X, the Department of Education announced that the state, led by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, violated Title IX.
The Department’s Office for Civil Rights has concluded its Title IX investigations into “California’s Department of Education & Interscholastic Federation and found both clearly violated Title IX by failing to protect women & girls from sex-based discrimination,” the post read.
RELATED: DOJ Agrees to Fight for Washington Head Coach Who Was Fired by University During COVID-Era Insanity
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Dhillon took to her X account earlier on Thursday to comment about the DOJ’s latest announcement — a new investigation of the Golden State, on serious, repeated, allegedly discriminatory hiring/employment practices in the University of California system:
Identity-based hiring is not only wrong — it is illegal!
The @CivilRights is investigating alleged serious violations of equal opportunity in employment by the UC system. Public employers ignore our civil rights laws at their peril.
🔗 https://t.co/IJ7KjHEdgS pic.twitter.com/ISIagmA1JM
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) June 26, 2025
She wrote:
Identity-based hiring is not only wrong — it is illegal! The @CivilRights [Division] is investigating alleged serious violations of equal opportunity in employment by the UC system. Public employers ignore our civil rights laws at their peril.
I wholeheartedly second what my colleague at sister site Hot Air, Beege Welborn’s,succinct comment, when sharing the Civil Rights division’s documents: “I love Harmeet.”
Justice Department Files Suit Against Orange County California Registrar of Voters for Refusing to Provide Non-Citizen Voter Removal Records in Violation of Federal Elections Lawshttps://t.co/SLLtKZIVap pic.twitter.com/hoTj2SeAnL
— DOJ Civil Rights Division (@CivilRights) June 25, 2025
Anyway, in this new sitdown video (below), we get a great answer from her on what conservatives and Republicans can tell those people who wave away the urgent need to clean up vote rolls via the Help America Vote Act/National Voter Registration Act–both of which she mentions to interviewer Charlie Kirk on Real America’s Voice program, “The Charlie Kirk Show” — because fraud is rare.
[…W]e have jurisdiction over clean voter rolls, that’s the Help America Vote Act. In this case, Orange County received credible information, it’s well publicized, that there were people on the voter rolls who are not American citizens.
Dhillon points out that there are “many ways that this can happen,” like someone “checking the wrong box” when they vote, saying that it can be completely “innocent or intentional.”
“It could be someone committing fraud, who knows,” she says. The point she stresses here, though, is that the government is responsible for protecting American citizens’ rights:
Every American citizen is entitled to their vote counting equally to other American citizens only…This is a fundamental premise of our democracy.
Any state or local government that refuses to do so is breaking the law, Dhillion states. Then there was the issue so many of us come to loggerheads with during election time, when people try to argue about the rarity of fraud on voter rolls: (emphasis added)
The response I always get to this complaint that every violation [of the voting laws] when it comes to our voting rolls — “Whatever, Harmeet, voter fraud is so rare!” Well, it doesn’t have to be fraud. It could be any number of reasons. Every citizen is entitled to his or her vote being counted once and being counted equally…and that isn’t happening [here].
She also talks about the limits on what the federal government can do under our federalist system:
Big picture is that our election laws and our system of federalism are, first of all, made, for the most part, by state legislatures. That’s an important point.
There are some federal laws involving clean voter rolls…National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act. There’s also an important law called the Voting Right Act, which is the subject of extensive litigation on the Left in redistricting — really weaponizing it in one direction.
She adds that the Justice Department “[doesn’t] have jurisdiction over everything, over how states do their thing [on voting] for the most part.”
Once again, we’re seeing that this second Trump administration is the worst fascist dictatorship ever.
Watch:
Every American citizen is entitled to their vote counting equally to other American citizens ONLY.
Any state or jurisdiction that refuses to comply with the Help America Vote Act will be met with lawsuits from @CivilRights. pic.twitter.com/y07lIWvOAs
— AAGHarmeetDhillon (@AAGDhillon) June 26, 2025
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