Lawfare Daily: DOJ’s Very Online Civil Rights Head, with Quinta Jurecic and Anna Bower
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2026
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
In her recent profile of Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic writes, “Dhillon’s leadership of the division is both the next step in the natural progression of a career spent needling liberals and a preview of what is to come if she continues to rise within the Justice Department.” But, Jurecic notes, Dhillon may be “at the top of her game, yet her position has never appeared more precarious.”
For today’s episode, Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sits down with Jurecic and Lawfare Senior Editor Anna Bower to talk through the life and times of the Justice Department’s current head of the civil rights division. They discuss Dhillon's extensive social media presence, the hallmarks of her tenure at the Justice Department thus far, and why there may be limits to how high she can climb in the MAGA movement.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It was only, you know, several hours after this church service protest started going viral, |
| 0:08.8 | that we started to see Harmeet Dillon, you know, posting about it. |
| 0:13.7 | And eventually, the Justice Department, the Civil Rights Division, you know, investigated this, brought charges against, |
| 0:23.9 | you know, over two dozen people who were involved in this protest at the church. |
| 0:29.6 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Tyler McBrion, managing editor of Lawfare, with Quinta Durecic, |
| 0:35.9 | a staff writer at the Atlantic, and Anna Bauer, a senior |
| 0:39.1 | editor here at Lawfare. It seems to me that you should want DOJ to actually be putting in the |
| 0:44.8 | time and the work to seriously investigate these cases in ways that will actually resolve the |
| 0:50.9 | issues rather than this sort of slap-dash social media-driven approach that maybe, |
| 0:56.6 | you know, there's a lot of sound and fury, but the end result may be very little. |
| 1:01.7 | Today we're talking about Quinta's recent profile in the Atlantic of Harmead Dylan, |
| 1:06.5 | the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department. |
| 1:10.9 | So, Quinta, I want to start with you. |
| 1:13.3 | There's no shortage of things happening in the world within your ambit. |
| 1:18.2 | But you recently put a lot of time and effort into an amazing profile out on Harmeet Dillon, |
| 1:24.2 | out in the Atlantic, very recently, just days ago at the time of recording. |
| 1:28.5 | So why, Harmeet Dylan, why did you choose to write about her? |
| 1:34.0 | Well, always good to be back on the Leverer podcast. |
| 1:36.6 | So Dylan, I think, is a really interesting figure because she has a very important job, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. |
| 1:47.4 | So she oversees the Civil Rights Division. |
| 1:50.4 | That has always been, you know, a significant position in the Justice Department. |
| 1:54.7 | You're in charge of really the lion's share of the government's civil rights enforcement. |
... |
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