Two California U.S. senators, working with their Democratic colleagues, have requested responses from Trump’s loyalists and California, and are now heading the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.
In a letter sent to Assistant Atty on Friday. General Hermet Dillon, seven senators, including California Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, cited a report that Dillon had emailed an order to change his long-standing enforcement goal to an employee.
When Senators pass laws that state that these directives “may be inconsistent” with Congress’ intentions, they will write that Congress’ intentions and must be disclosed to them for review by Thursday.
The Senator also mentioned reports that multiple career counsels and supervisors from the unit have either left or been reassigned, and that political appointees who have not remained in unit leadership and who have no experience in such work are now fully in charge. According to the Senator, Dillon and other department leaders have further reduced the unit’s experienced workforce through acquisitions and other measures.
“These measures appear to be attempts to cajole career staff in the department to voluntarily leave to fundamentally change the work,” the senator wrote. They requested that the division’s “all personnel-related changes” be disclosed by Thursday since Trump took office.
Dillon, a San Francisco lawyer, Republican insider and conservative critic, declined to comment when asked by the Times about the Senator’s letter.
But in an interview with conservative podcast host Glenn Beck, Dillon admitted he was dull with departmental lawyers on his expectations of working to enforce Trump’s political agenda, regardless of his personal politics.
“We tell them these are the president’s priorities. This is what we’re focusing on, governing ourselves accordingly,” she said. “And now there are dozens of lawyers, and more than 100 lawyers, have decided they don’t want to do what they need to do with their job.”
Dillon said he is working to find alternative lawyers who are interested in implementing the law “not a woken up ideology.”
Beck called Dillon the perfect person for work, and said she was a “machine” and “tough as tough as a claw.” Civil rights groups have criticised President Trump’s appointment and the Senate confirmation this month to lead the department.
In addition to writing to Dillon, the senator wrote separate letters to Sen. Eric Schmidt of Missouri, Republican chairman of the Judicial and Judicial Subcommittee on the Constitution, asking for a supervisory hearing “to renew these Senate and the American people.”
In a statement to the Times, Schmidt said Tuesday that Americans “repelled the left awakening ideology by electing Trump, and that Dillon “isn’t wasted time implementing President Trump’s agenda, instead of enforcing a fundamental policy that runs through the sounds of Americans.”
In their letter to Dillon, the Democrat cited reports from the New York Times, Guardian and Bloomberg Act. In one article, The New York Times reported that Dillon was important to the president to “focus on enforcing orders against transgender women on sports and other issues.”
The senator wrote that one of Dillon’s new directives reportedly called on the department’s voting rights section to prioritize investigations into election fraud “despite the overwhelming evidence that it was a rare event.”
The second directive called for staff to “research for federal funding awards for discrimination against the president’s agenda, which could lead to attempts to punish state, local and private institutions opposed to the administration’s culture war agenda,” the senator wrote. The third, they added, “evidently directs the institution’s investigation to focus on racism against white applicants.”
Lawmakers’ concerns about such changes add to the wider warning among Democrats, civil rights groups and legal experts that Trump is turning the Justice Department into the enforcement unit of his conservative politics and enforcement policies.
Democrats, including Sif and Padilla, raised serious concerns about Ati’s appointment. Pam Bondi and General Dillon, who represented Trump in the past. The senators questioned both women’s independence and their willingness to split with Trump when the law was requested.
Like Bondi, Dillon pushed Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She was also a cultural crusade against politics that “wakes up” for many years as a prominent member of California’s Republican Party.
Before the Department of Justice appointment, Dillon gave himself a name in California by challenging Covid-19 restrictions and voting rights initiatives and attacking California law aimed at protecting transgender youth. In addition to Trump, she represents California teenager Chloe Cole. Chloe Cole of California is a prominent voice in the “denhamed” movement, and Kari Lake has failed to become the Arizona governor candidate who Trump has appointed as a special advisor to a US agency for global media.
Dillon claims in 2018 that she has a “adjusted attack on civil liberties from businesses, politicians, socialist revolutionaries, and biased or biased government officials, and as a result, her star soon saw the stars rising in the Republican circle, fans have argued that her star is being sacrificed by rare California policies.
The Center’s CEO, Mark Trammel, praised Trump’s election for the Civil Rights Post, and in response to her confirmation, she said she was “a great lawyer, a fierce advocate for civil liberty, and principled at the heart.”
After she took the oath, the Justice Department said that Dillon “contrary to the person before her, he brings experience and perspective to the DOJ.”
Others warned that Dillon would ignore longstanding principles in the department and reassert it in her own image, not by protecting them, but by focusing on how to limit, rather than protecting, rights, especially for vulnerable groups such as transgender people.
The Citizens and Human Rights Leadership Council, a coalition of hundreds of civil rights organizations across the country, denounced her confirmation that she was “not a civil rights lawyer,” and said that she “has no business” to lead the federal department.
“This confirmation is insulted and we need to warn everyone that election deniers are in charge of enforcing the voting rights law, that anti-LGBTQ+ activists are tasked with protecting the civil rights of American LGBTQ+ people, and that another Trump personal lawyer is a federal government signing agency and an executive leadership agency.
Banita Gupta, director of the Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, said in a statement in the Times that Dillon’s previous move as head of the department, and their departures spurred among career lawyers, was the cause of the alarm.
“This is not just a change in enforcement priorities with changes in management. This department is being directed at the head and used as a weapon against the very community that has been established to protect,” Gupta said. “The massive departures this caused are unprecedented and easy to understand.”
Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.
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