Harvard draws the legal blueprint for how to fight back Trump’s revenge campaign

The legal system in this country has long prided itself on supplying justice in a measured way Governing body authorities are required to abide by an elaborate set of procedures before they can impose penalties on anyone But all that seems to have fallen by the wayside in the second Trump administration Nowhere has that been more evident than in its dealings with Harvard University On May the New York Times published an article under the headline Trump Administration Escalates Harvard Feud With New Justice Dept Scrutiny It stated that the Trump administration is scrutinizing whether Harvard s admissions policies comply with a Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action opening a new front in its widening effort to bring the institution to heel The Justice Department is trying to determine whether Harvard s admissions process has been used to defraud the leadership in violation of the False Maintains Act That act was never intended for such a purpose The administration is using it as a tool of vengeance because Harvard has had the temerity to resist the administration s various edicts In return Trump and his subordinates are using every lever at their disposal to make the university pay the steep price for doing so That is revenge pure and simple Revenge law professor William Miller contends is crazed uncontrolled subjective individual admitting no rule of limitation And it proceeds in an escalating cycle of tit-for-tat moves until one of the parties involved surrenders The cycle with Harvard started on Jan when the president signed an executive order calling for tougher enforcement of authorities efforts against antisemitism On Feb President Trump appointed Fox News personality Leo Terrell to head a federal executive Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism The day his appointment was revealed Terrell who has been called HARVARD S WORST NIGHTMARE took to X to taunt the school Harvard I start work next week Related RFK Jr is laundering Christian right views as MAHA In early March Terrell went on Fox News to lay out his plan to bankrupt universities by withholding every single federal dollar He added that If universities do not play ball lawyer up because the federal regime is coming after you A month later the administration took initiatives to make good on Terrell s threat It sent Harvard a letter laying out the pre-conditions your institution must comply with in order to be in good standing and continue to be the recipient of federal taxpayer dollars It then laid out those conditions They include Harvard overhaul its international apprentice campaign to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and overview to the federal regime any foreign apprentice who commits conduct violations Inspecting Harvard is less about the money it may have obtained from the federal governing body and more a fishing expedition about the university s admissions process and its use of diversity equity and inclusion programs It also sought to require Harvard to pay for outside review through of the school s viewpoint diversity and hire a critical mass of new faculty if it is not identified to be sufficiently diverse That is where the university drew the line Harvard publicly denounced the proposal The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights In short order the president threatened to withdraw Harvard s Tax Exempt Status The Department of Homeland Assurance commented it might revoke Harvard s certification to participate in the Pupil and Exchange Visa Campaign jeopardizing the enrollment of thousands of international students and The Department of Schooling sends a records request to Harvard demanding information on all overseas gifts plus information relating to expelled foreign students Harvard again poked the bear on April when it filed suit against the administration As one would expect in any administration seeking vengeance it responded by upping the ante launching new investigations cutting off all new federal research grants to Harvard freezing an additional million in federal funding pledged to the university and on Thursday multiple federal agencies sent termination notices all at once affecting researchers across the university from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences to the physiological school As the New York Times explains In the four and a half weeks since Harvard criticized the leadership s demands as overly intrusive and announced it would not comply the administration has aimed at least eight investigations and other actions against the university That brings us to the False Suggests probe It beggars the imagination to see the law used as the administration seeks to use it The False Maintains Act dates back to when Congress fearful that people who were supplying the Union Army were enriching themselves by defrauding the regime enacted it It has been amended plenty of times since and prohibits anyone from knowingly submitting a false claim to the authorities or knowingly making a false record or comment to get a false claim paid by the leadership As the Times reports the False States Act is typically used to go after authorities contractors for swindling And targeting a university under the False Declares Act is highly distinctive We need your help to stay independent Subscribe currently to sponsorship Salon s progressive journalism Moreover the Justice Department letter about Harvard s alleged false claim didn t even specify what was falsely claimed It seems clear that this law is being used to harass Harvard and to continue Trump s vendetta Examining Harvard is less about the money it may have obtained from the federal regime and more a fishing expedition about the university s admissions process and its use of diversity equity and inclusion programs The administration is alleging that Harvard did not change its admissions policies after the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action unconstitutional Trump s Justice Department doesn t seem to care that the university revealed that had done so or that as Reuters noted last fall The percentage of Black students in Harvard University s freshman class dropped by more than a fifth following a landmark U S Supreme Court ruling that barred colleges from using race as a factor in admissions The primary focus of this latest federal administration attack on Harvard is to require it to produce a trove of documents and provide written answers to a list of detailed questions in the next three weeks It is also seeking any text messages emails or other communications from Harvard functionaries discussing President Trump s executive orders earlier this year aimed at rooting out diversity equity and inclusion programs And if all that did not reveal the administration s real purpose The Justice Department also gave Harvard days to identify a school official to testify under oath about its admissions policies and how those polices may have changed after the Supreme Court ruling in For a long time legal scholars have warned that laws designed for one purpose can be used for others But meager of them could have imagined the way the Trump administration is now using and abusing our Nation s rules and regulations Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain got it right when he called the False Proposes assessment yet another abusive and retaliatory action that the administration has initiated against Harvard It is as if Trump is channeling God s Old Testament announcement Vengeance is mine I will repay with Harvard being one of the president s bulk prominent targets Read more about this topic How the Supreme Court enabled Donald Trump s mile high bribe No more Souters A court captured by far-right conspiracy theories How the GOP drove the Supreme Court off a cliff The post Harvard draws the legal blueprint for how to fight back Trump s revenge campaign appeared first on Salon com