Folks, my new graphic novel, Unwanted, a tall tale of the Old Weston New Wave, is out for preorder now.

I've been working on this for 25 years. It's a dark comedy with a shiny exterior. Please mean, you just keep, just keep staying strong. I'm good. Good afternoon, Michael Malice here.

Let that be your welcome for the next hour. I have, I am so excited for our next guest. I've been planning this for weeks. I haven't told anyone. We have Harmeet Dylan. Harmeet you are the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice. Previous to your appointment, you've been known for years as a right of center attorney and pundit. So thank you so much, take in time to do the show.

Well, thanks for having me today,

Michael, I'm excited for our conversation. Well, you I'm going to read a quote from you, which I frankly makes me giddy. Okay. So when you joined the DOJ, you said quote, on mass dozens and now over a hundred attorneys decided they'd rather not do what their job requires them to do. We need to replace those people because we don't want people in the federal government who feel like it's their pet project to go persecute police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people, praying outside of worship facilities instead of doing violence. So I'd love to just give you an open-ended question of how you approached your job once you got it. Well thanks for the question and you know you prefaced it by my years in the conservative movement so I've been a lawyer over 30 years now and for the last 20 years or so been my own boss before this job and was able to take a lot of cases involving important First Amendment issues, as well as standing up for workers who were discriminated against in various walks, including in California on the basis of their political views. And so that kind of fighting plaintiff mentality is how I've lived my career, but it's actually kind of rare in the conservative movement, which is, you know, generally speaking, lawyers are small-sea conservative, in other words, they're very interested in conserving their own, you know, income, power, and opportunities, and less so fighting for the greater movement. And that is really put the conservative side at a disadvantage when it comes to the war of ideas in the courts and civil rights, because the left doesn't have this hang up. In fact, some of the most important civil rights victories in our history have come from principled liberal lawyers willing to stand up in court and make arguments time and again and lose until they won. And, you know, we have, you know, some bad decisions out there. Koramatsu, Dred Scott, the slaughterhouse cases and all of those. And you had many cases before Brown v. Board of Education finally won, trying to insist on equality for African Americans after the reconstruction. And so, you know, I admire that tradition because that's how change is made in the courts. And sometimes when you have such a sclerotic legislature, like we have in many parts of the country, some would say in Washington, you have a hostile executive which we have half the time in D.C. and again in many parts of the country now in California where I came from a fixture.

Courts are your only mechanism for obtaining justice. So, I think that's kind of the background. And so, when I raised my hand and said, I'd be willing to do this job after the president and Pam Bondy and others in the administration asked me if I would be willing to do it, up, but gave up my law practice that I founded, my nonprofit that I founded the Center for American Liberty. And I, I mean, basically my perspective was, I'm giving up a lot of the things I love to come to DC to do this job for the American people. I'm going to make every minute of it worth it. I'm not here to mark time. I'm not here to pad my resume, I'm actually too old for that, my resume is pretty good and I'm pretty happy with it. I don't need that. I'm here to do good and then leave, which is also, by the way, very strange for DC. People kind of want to get people into some of these positions so they can trade favors and back and forth, it's a revolving door. I don't want to do a great job here and I want to leave because I actually liked what I did before. So with that background, when I came to this job, you know, and every job the first week is like HR and fill out your paperwork and pick your insurance, blah, blah, blah, go through all these trainings, how to handle confidential matters. So week two was when I really, I sent some letters out at the end of week one, putting over 50 American universities on notice that we were going to investigate that. And then on the second week, I sent memos to each of the sections. And so the way the DOJs organize is each of the different components. My component is the Civil Rights Division. It's one of the largest components in the DOJ, and at the time I was nominated, it had

over 400 lawyers here, and then another couple of hundred staff, you know, HR, statisticians, paralegals, blah, blah, blah. And so I sent memos out to the 13 sections. They included, for example, disability rights and employment, education, immigration, and employment enforcement. There's special litigation, which includes litigation against the police, prison systems, et cetera, and then a few other sections. I sent each of them a memo, a short memo saying I just want to make sure everybody's on the same page regarding what the job is here. And the job is to enforce in each of these sections specific federal statutes or constitutional provisions, but to do so with the priorities and the lens of the president's early executive orders. And so, you know, with regards to immigration and education and employment, we're talking about anti-DEI. We're talking about stopping the use of the federal government to force quotas on schools and on employers all over the country. You know, with regard to special litigation. We're talking about ending this standing order to persecute police departments and impose nonsense restrictions on them that decrease safety and increase the cost of policing throughout the United States. And so, but, you know, you would think this be something that people would be expecting because, hey, there was an election. The boss changed, maybe our priorities will change. Not so in the Civil Rights Division. The Civil Rights Division, in fact, when I took this job on and I'd been considered for this position 10 years ago in the first Trump administration, I had federal judges call me and say, first of all, don't do that job. That's insane. You'll never succeed and you'll be miserable and everyone will make your life a living hell. And if you do succeed, you'll never get confirmed by the Senate for anything because it's very unpopular to do this job and do it well. I don't really care. So I said, I'm up for the challenge. So I stepped up to do it. But the civil rights division is a tough not to crack. And some of the lawyers here in this department had been here for decades. And they scoffed and mocked at the idea that the president could change their priorities. I didn't think it was going to happen. They thought, I would be a nice little, well regarded lawyer and stay in my lane and put out some press releases, make a couple of filings, virtue signal from my office, not walk down the hall. But that's not what happened. What happened was I said, my way or the highway, and my way, it wasn't my way, it's President Trump's way, consistent with the statutes that I took an oath um, and the Senate confirmed me. So I had the mandate to do this job according to what, uh, is required. And that caused by now well over, uh, almost 300 lawyers to quit 400. So, uh, wow. It was like a brain drain. And I think they thought that we would run after them screaming, please come back, please

come back, we can't do the job without you. We are doing the job without them. And it's a different job. Now we're enforcing the federal civil rights laws, not for a select few, but for all Americans. That's the promise. That's what the civil rights laws promise. But that's never how it's been done here at the civil rights division. So it is a radical departure.

I mean, people accuse me, oh, Hermit Dylan is radically departed.

I have.

Because now we're protecting all Americans, not just a few. I mean, that's a crazy statistic. I was not aware of that huge number. The question, I have an even more kind of basic question, which is day one or the first week when I'm always curious about this. When someone takes over any kind of bureaucracy,

how are you supposed to have an idea of what cases are involved in the priorities? I mean, the tentacles are gonna be everywhere. And, per what you just said, I'm sure many of these lawyers who are ostensibly under you would be perfectly happy to keep things from, you know, coming to your desk knowing that you'd put the caboch on it if you're aware of it. you're going to have the bureaucracy that is intentionally trying to obscure things from you.

How did you manage to get kind of a briefing of what exactly the department had been previously up to? Well, over the years, as a private lawyer pursuing civil rights claims, I've approached the civil rights division of the Department of Justice to get involved in my cases. So for example, during COVID, I had many righteous cases against governors all over the United States.

Over 20. rights claims, I've approached the civil rights division of the Department of Justice to get involved in my cases. So for example, during COVID, I had many righteous cases against governors all over the United States, over 20 cases. And I asked the civil rights division to get involved and I had knew a couple of attorneys in the civil rights division. They had moved on into private practice. I gave them phone calls and I asked, you know, what's your advice on how to deal with this? They all kind of chuckled and they said, well, they're going to be some unpleasant, you know, Easter eggs slash grenades buried in the infrastructure there. They're going to be things they're doing that they're going to hide from you. These are the bad people to look out for and then these are the handful of good people. Now, in the way this works, the president called me just a couple

of weeks after the election and asked me to do this, I ran down to Mar-a-Lago for an interview with Pam Bondi, like I think Thanksgiving weekend, if I'm not mistaken, of 2024. So before the inauguration, before any of that. And so, you know, I was effectively chosen as a nominee before the president was sworn in and then he nominated me that day.

And they immediately put somebody in place as a deputy to manage the store, a political person while they wait for the confirmation of the principal. And so I had a hand in, you know, helping identify that person, you know, former secretary of state from a red state who came in and ran the shop and, the shop and he got the reports from all these people. We had a few other deputies who were being selected and put in through the process of vetting by the White House. So I had a handful of political people here running the show, but they were getting reports from the career heads of these 13 different sections. And you know, I mean, there was some other staff here in the front office of the DOJ, the deputy attorney general's office, the attorney general's office, helping that's what they call a landing team and an administration that goes to every agency. And these are typically people therefore a short time. They usually come in, cycle in, cycle out from private practice, either because they don't want to go in formally and give up all of their connections. Or frankly, it's a great way to be very well connected to be part of the landing team, and then you know all the people who are there. So those folks were minding the store up until the time of my Senate confirmation in April of 2025. I literally just had a meeting here in my office and this is my office here in DOJ behind the door behind me used to be J. Edgar Hoover's office. So I've got the haunted wing here at the DOJ. I prefer to have my office here but some I think my predecessor Christian Clark had our office in J. Hoover's office, which is kind of appropriate. Anyway, I just had a meeting today where I was told in detail by my current management and one of my sections, what a pack of lies, frankly, they'd been fed by leadership in a particular important case. Case that's important to me. What a pack of lies they've been told. And I was like, okay, well, it's, you know, May 2026, o'clock. It's time to fix this and get going already. So I laid out the framework of what I wanted to done and, you know, we're going to overcome that. But it's been like that in all of the sections now. Right. So many people left which was a hindrance to doing the job in a way but they weren't going to do the job I wanted and it's been a big blessing because there's a combination of jobs to fill and people who want to fill them so we have been blessed by an abundance of of well-meaning lawyers all over the country who want to come serve their country and have come here or working in satellite offices around the country now. We're allowing experienced attorneys to work from a U.S. attorney's office, which wasn't the case in the past. And so, you know, now we have some talented lawyers filling these slots. Some of them have come from, like, for example, we have a second amendment section which never existed before. One of the top second amendment lawyers in the country from the nonprofit world in private practice is heading that section. I have a lawyer who came from my former nonprofit, the Center for American Liberty, very talented lawyer, young

lawyer, is heading up educational issues. We have employment issues, rather. We have three or

four career attorneys here in the Civil Rights Division who happen to be enthusiastic about doing

the job for all Americans. They're in leadership positions now, and I'm so grateful to them,

because they have given us the institutional and longitudinal knowledge of how things are done, how to unstick things in this bureaucratic system that we're in, and how to get things done, you know, and get them approved, and get them up the food chain, and get the attorney general to sign the right piece of the paper. So all of that I pulled together and we have a very well-running machine here. We are in constant contact with the White House on important policy issues, literally on a daily, sometimes several times a day basis. And we are in constant contact with outside groups of all kinds, any kind. I've met with religious groups from every denomination in my conference room on issues of religious liberty.

And I get calls from members of Congress. So, you know, there's a ton of input and the challenge here is prioritizing the thousands of things we could be doing into the hundreds of things we can do in a given year. Yeah, it's it's seem like bear goldwater wrote a book about this in the 70s, you know, talking about this kind of invisible bureaucracy. And they can play the long game they can sit and wait for you know any president the four or eight years I think president Trump had to deal with this enormously during his first term I believe he underestimated to what extent that you know invisible Washington bureaucracy are just going to sit and sit on their hands or undermine you know their stent their Superiors and be like we're gonna be here when you're gone So it. So it's kind of shocking and not surprising that even a year in your tenure, you're still finding grenades hidden in the bureaucracy. And it also speaks to how clever these people are at covering their tracks and operating independently of any kind of congressional executive oversight. You may say clever, they're dishonest. And yeah, and it's too, yeah, perhaps I'm a bit naive. I'm a very idealistic person and I've spent my entire career fighting for principles that I believe in deeply. And look, but by the way, if I were a government bureaucrat and I'm getting paid a salary to

do the job, I wouldn't insist on doing my principles. I would understand like the job is to do the job. And if you don't like that, you should quit. But exactly how you described it, almost all of the lawyers who quit from the Civil Rights Division, let's call it 80 or 90%. They were here during the first Trump administration. And this is no knock on the leadership then,

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