Transcript of Harmeet Dhillon on The Tucker Carlson Show

But we’re trying to change it. There are people left behind. And I actually don’t care what their politics are. They can have their views. I believe in the First Amendment. The question is, are you willing to do the job under the job description as set out by this administration? After all, the DOJ is part of the executive branch. The president gets to pick the top people running it and he kind of gets to set the agenda.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you half your lawyers quit?

HARMEET DHILLON: Yeah, that’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who’d you replace them with?

Rebuilding the Division

HARMEET DHILLON: So we are in a DOGE period here in the government. And so I haven’t replaced the people who’ve quit as yet. So we’re making do with who’s left behind, some of whom share the views of the ones who left, but perhaps weren’t as able to get jobs outside and some who I think are willing to work with us.

TUCKER CARLSON: So my understanding was DOGE was going to be applied to like the fat in government, but like DOJ is kind of central institution in the country and having lawyers who can equally apply the law and sort of end lawfare, be honest and principled. That’s important.

HARMEET DHILLON: Oh, I think it’s very important. And I’ve spoken to the Attorney General about it and I’m confident that soon we’ll be able to hire some lawyers who are down with the program of getting the job done for the American people. So I’m looking forward to that troop coming in.

But for now, I have some political appointees who are extremely dedicated and passionate. I brought in lawyers of my vintage, quite a few experienced trial lawyers and a few younger ones as well. But they’re all dedicated to the cause. And so together just in a few weeks, we have already made a lot of news nationally, going after the mayor of Chicago, for example.

TUCKER CARLSON: So first of all, thank you for the. I was just thinking of you, I should say my former attorney and a great attorney going in to run the civil rights division. I mean, they must have just died when you showed up.

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, I didn’t witness any of that. But the crying, the unhappy hours, the mass resignations, the leaking. There’s a support group for former civil rights attorneys.

TUCKER CARLSON: These are all indications.

HARMEET DHILLON: Yeah, these are all leading indicators of, you know, the stages of grief. And so one of the former attorneys goes on MSNBC regularly and, you know, kind of vents about the storied civil rights division of the DOJ is being destroyed. Someone heckled me at the DMV when I was waiting to get my driver’s license. So, you know, it is cutting to the core of the liberal ethos that we’re actually trying to apply these civil rights laws, which I believe in, in an even handed way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, equally.

HARMEET DHILLON: Equally.

TUCKER CARLSON: We’re all American citizens.

HARMEET DHILLON: That’s right. Equal protection. It means equal for all. Yeah, you would think.

Taking Action Against Discrimination

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you would think. And actually I’m laughing, but it’s terrifying what’s been happening there and I’m truly grateful that you’re there. So, Brandon Johnson, mayor of Chicago, tell us how he appeared on your radar and what the response is.

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, first of all, I’m thankful for Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, which I sued a few times before he did that. And now it’s where I get a lot of my news, of course, you and everyone else. And so I get criticized by the mainstream media, if you will, for being perpetually online. But that’s actually where I see a lot of the civil rights violations in our country being exposed because people, elected officials in our country feel very comfortable acting with impunity and stating with impunity that they’re going to discriminate.

And so he said the quiet part out loud, which is in Chicago, according to his words, “I hire mainly black people for the positions of authority.” And, you know, then he listed out he was at a church and he said that at a church.

I had a reporter reach out to me saying, “How did this come to your attention?” I mean, as if it was some kind of secret. I responded, well, the three angles of camera, I think, suggests that it wasn’t meant to be confidential or anything. This wasn’t like some kind of a sting operation. He publicly said, “I find people of a certain description to be better, and I want to help them build their businesses. And so I’m giving them government jobs.”

It’s kind of counterintuitive. And what that says and what I’ve been hearing since I came out and said, “Oh, really?” And then we opened up a federal civil rights investigation the following day into the hiring practices.

TUCKER CARLSON: The following day?

HARMEET DHILLON: The following day, less than 24 hours after I saw that video, my team stepped up and we’ve opened a federal civil rights investigation into the apparent violations of federal employment law that are occasioned by preferring one race over the other in hiring.

TUCKER CARLSON: His predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, said at a press conference, I’m not talking to white people. I don’t like them. I’m not talking to them. I’m not answering any questions from white reporters. And no one did anything about it. So that’s the environment that produced Brandon Johnson, where you could just like, openly be racist. You know, I don’t like Jews, I don’t like whites, I don’t like blacks. Who talks like that?

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, Tucker, every university administrator in the United States, even in the face of these Students for Fair Admissions case at Harvard. So that’s another project that we’re dealing with at the Civil Rights Division is the absolute extent of the impunity with which campus administrators are continuing to discriminate and openly defy Supreme Court precedent.

So we’ve opened up numerous investigations into that as well. But it’s a pervasive problem in our country that racism has become institutionalized to the point where people just feel comfortable saying, “Yeah, I’m sorry, you’re a white man. Thanks for playing. And you don’t get admission, you don’t get a job, and you don’t get to have equal opportunity.” Asians as well. This is blatant discrimination and racism in our country. And our job at the Civil Rights Division for so long as I’m in charge of it, is to eradicate that, take it on, make examples, and put a stop to it.

# The DOJ’s Assault on White Christians Is Worse Than You Think

The Problem of Discrimination in America

TUCKER CARLSON: Every time I hear someone in the administration talk about this, they frame it around Israel, which I find infuriating, not because I’m against Israel, but, like, what does Israel have to do with it? They’re discriminating against American citizens. Why? From a public relations perspective, wouldn’t it be better to stick to the principle that in the United States, you can’t use government money to discriminate against American citizens on the basis of race? Like, why not just say that?

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, I think there is a certain strain of antisemitism that’s unique that we are confronting, but it’s American citizens who are the victims of it. And so religious discrimination is also illegal in our federal civil rights laws. And so where you have students who are wearing yarmulkes and they’re being blocked from by their professors and their classmates from entering their classes, that’s illegal. And we’re just calling it that.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know, but let’s be real. I mean, that’s just silly. Look at the numbers. Are Jewish students. You know what 2% of the population are? There more than 2% at Ivy League schools? Yeah. White Christian students, you know, what percentage of the population are they? 30 something. Are they 30%? Not even close. So we could just reduce it, but it’s like, you can’t even say that for some reason. I mean, the discrimination has been going on for 60 years against white Christians, and the numbers show it. So, like, do you know what I mean?

HARMEET DHILLON: But I’m saying that. We are saying that under my leadership and the people who I work with, they are taking it on frontally. It’s racism. Yes, it is racist. It is illegal now under the Supreme Court’s clear direction. And Harvard is doing it, and Princeton is doing it, and all of these schools are doing it.

There’s many different kinds of discrimination happening. There’s foreign money coming into our campuses. And, you know, there was a report recently that Stanford is basically under control of the Chinese Communist Party. And so all of these problems are happening at the same time. And, you know, they’ve been allowed to drift and people have been bullied. I was explaining to someone the other day that to do this job correctly, you have to not care what people think about you at cocktail parties.

The Problem with Identity Politics

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, clearly. But you’re way past that. But can I ask, like, I guess what I worry about, just to put a finer point on what I was attempting to express, I’m like, identity politics is just bad. Kind of. No matter who’s getting hurt and no matter who’s benefiting, it’s just bad. It divides the country. Is there some way to just, like, deracialize the whole thing and just return to colorblind standards in admission, hiring, and contracting?

HARMEET DHILLON: There is. I mean, that’s what our laws demand. And so that’s what the Supreme Court ruled in that one case. But, you know, to take on the mayor of Chicago, we didn’t do that four years ago. We didn’t do that under the Bush administration. We just sort of, you know, people in power just sort of sat there and took it as if there was some need to atone for prior sins by discriminating against American citizens today.

And I mean, you know, Asians are discriminated against in hiring in Silicon Valley. I’ve taken on many cases of that. What did these recent immigrants do to deserve discrimination other than being successful and then being punished for it? And so you really can’t right the wrongs of the past by being racist today. I think we should really have to have that level of moral clarity. And just say that and operate that way.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s collective punishment is what it really is. You’re saying someone who looked like you did something bad, therefore I’m punishing you, or someone who looked like you was hurt, therefore you get the benefit now. I mean, the whole thing is just like, it eliminates the idea of the individual, of the individual, the unique human soul.

HARMEET DHILLON: Right. Which is counter to the very principles on which our country was founded. The entire enlightenment was all about individual rights and responsibility. And we’re engaging in, you know, Chinese communist level collective guilt and, you know, collective punishment.

TUCKER CARLSON: It does feel that way.

Taking Action Against Discrimination

HARMEET DHILLON: It does feel that way. And it feels that way on campuses. I think back, I thought it was bad at Dartmouth when I was at Dartmouth more than 35 years ago, almost 40 years ago now when I went to Dartmouth. And it’s so much worse today in most of these campuses. But like calling it what it is, naming it as racism and discrimination is a start. Now we will follow through. We will bring cases, proud of our president for spearheading, yanking money, our federal tax dollars away from the institutions that are the worst offenders. And I think you’re going to see much more of that happening soon.

TUCKER CARLSON: I completely agree. So back to the mayor of Chicago. What happens next?

HARMEET DHILLON: We’ve opened up an investigation, we’ve demanded some data from him and we will be in touch with some very specific data and we’ll be going back years to understand. And what I’m hearing from members of the public already is, well, I applied for this job, I applied for that job. I didn’t get it. I’m not the right race, I’m not the right gender, according to his descriptions.

And so what the federal government has been doing over the years to ordinary companies is demand this data and then force them to hire according to a particular pattern. We’re going to do the same thing. We’re going to demand the data. And then if there’s a pattern of discrimination, which I think there is based on what he said he’s told us, we will leave him at his words. They’ll have to take action to correct that.

I’m guessing that plaintiffs lawyers all over the United States are contacting plaintiffs right now in Chicago and preparing cases against the city. So the taxpayers are going to pay for this pattern and practice of discrimination that has been described by the mayor. But it’s a long standing pattern. He’s just the one who said it out loud. It’s been happening for decades in that city.

There’s at the same time, there’s talk about reparations in multiple cities in the United States. I mean, again, that’s just a wealth transfer from people who didn’t do anything wrong to people who didn’t have anything wrong done to them, really. And it’s counterintuitive to what we believe in our country.

TUCKER CARLSON: Theft. Yeah. Do you think that could happen?

The Pendulum Swinging Back

HARMEET DHILLON: No. But the talk of it is manna for, you know, certain people. I think it is bait for Democrat elections, and it’s popular in certain communities. And so it’s crazy to see that. But I do think the pendulum is swinging back in some places because these policies, these wealth transfers, if you will, the episodic rioting that you see in our cities, it is not conducive to a peaceful lifestyle or productive society.

And so I think you actually are seeing, even in deep blue California, my home state, my former home state, you’re seeing the pendulum swing back in ways. I mean, San Francisco seems to be slowly pulling back from the brink of extremism. San Jose has a mayor who’s talking some sense. And so I’m hopeful.

But we can’t be passive about it. First, you have to be willing to call it out and stand up and say, no. It is wrong to hire on the basis of race in America. It is wrong to discriminate against people based on what their theoretical ancestors did 200 years ago. This is wrong. It’s un-American.

Working Within the System

TUCKER CARLSON: When you initiate an investigation into the mayor of Chicago, first of all, thank you for doing that. Thank you for. I think one of the benefits of what you’re doing is just noting something that everyone else takes for granted. As you said, people feel free to say this, and you’re just reminding everyone this is against federal law and it’s immoral. So I think it’s huge. But when you order a system Attorney General, this investigation, does the staff obey in your office?

HARMEET DHILLON: Oh, my staff. First of all, I’m surrounded by a lot of dedicated public servants like me, who are. Yes. So there was no. I mean, you know, you get to have a few political appointees in the front office is what we call it. So, you know, they jumped on it before I even asked. You know, someone was drafting a letter on Sunday afternoon to do this.

We also call the acting chairman of the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, who’s been working hand in glove with us on other discrimination issues, and she’s opened up an investigation as well. So the EEOC has subpoena power. You know, we’ve asked for documents, the EEOC can actually subpoena them and do a commissioner’s charge. And so eventually, at the end of their parallel investigation, they’ll have data that they can share with us as well.

So we’re working together in the university setting, in this setting, and in other settings with other branches of the executive. So, I mean, on any given day, I’m talking to the White House, I’m talking to colleagues of the Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security, had a conversation yesterday and other conversations like that are happening. So, you know, the team is very focused on our common goals.

Navigating the Deep State

TUCKER CARLSON: I hate even to say this out loud, but, you know, one of the ways that, you know, someone like you rolls in, you’ve got, you know, a public career, so everyone knows exactly where you stand. You’ve been highly ferocious over the years. And so, like, there’s no question what you’re going to do when you get there. You’re a known quantity and you’re a massive threat to the way things operate there. You haven’t worked in a federal agency before. There are all kinds of weird custom and laws, especially around classification. And so someone like you, they’re like, ah, you know, let’s trap her in something. Are you worried about that?

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, among the…

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, Mike Flynn is the most famous example of this.

HARMEET DHILLON: But, like, it is, we’ve learned some lessons and there are always new ways and there is a deep state. And, you know, just yesterday I had a conversation with one of my colleagues about the resistance that he was encountering. And I had my feedback. But part of my background is as an employment lawyer.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

HARMEET DHILLON: And so, you know, we’re not making some mistakes that some people who are, you know, simply defense lawyers might have made. I have a plaintiff’s lawyer mentality. And so, you know, I think, what would I do if I were the other side? And, you know, so I think about that.

So, you know, we’re giving people clear direction and opportunities, and if they don’t want to take those opportunities and they want to be in resistance mode, this is not the place for them. And so, you know, there are career paths elsewhere, and many people have chosen to take that. Some of them regretted it, some of them tried to come back. I think it is best that people who have passions to do something that’s opposite of what the President’s current agenda is should do that elsewhere. Not on the taxpayer dollar. Just my personal perspective.

Consent Decrees and Urban Crime

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’ve uncovered a bunch of stuff already. And one of the things that you uncovered, I think, is part of the answer to why our cities have become so dangerous. And it has to do with consent decrees that, you know, have been forced on cities and police departments by the federal government. Can you explain how that, how that has worked?

HARMEET DHILLON: Yeah, absolutely. So the consent decree trend kind of dates back to the Rodney King riots. And, you know, there’s terrible rioting in Los Angeles.

TUCKER CARLSON: 92ish.

# The DOJ’s Assault on White Christians Is Worse Than You Think

The History of DOJ Consent Decrees

HARMEET DHILLON: Yeah, about 30, 33 years ago. I was in law school at the time. The police got blamed for some fairly rotten cultural trends in our society. The police got blamed trying to control that riot. I mean, you have people like Maxine Waters egging on the crowd and feeding the flames, and somehow the police got left holding the bag.

What happened was the Department of Justice, of course, California as well, but the Department of Justice opened up investigations into police practices. The trend has been Department of Justice, particularly under Democrat administrations, opens up what’s called a pattern and practice investigation. They basically say that anytime one cop does something wrong, it must be because there is a systemic problem in the police department. There’s poor training, there’s ineffective policies, there’s ineffective resources or there’s racism. There’s always racism. That’s underlying most of these police consent decrees is racism.

When the federal government comes after you with its endless resources and its punitive scope of measures that it can apply, even America’s biggest cities with tens of billions of dollars of budgets, they quake because it can become very expensive and it can become a politically charged football to continue to have these federal court hearings and judges and all of that.

What typically happens is the DOJ says, “Hi, we are from the government. We think that you’re a racist, and we’d like you to enter into a consent decree where you, the city is going to pay Bob over here, who works at a big white shoe law firm, several million dollars to monitor your compliance with this.” I mean, this is a binder. Some of the consent decrees are longer than this, hundreds of pages long of minutely detailed orders of what they’re supposed to do to improve their police practices.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who comes up with those guidelines?

HARMEET DHILLON: The lawyers in the civil rights divisions of the United States Department of Justice.

TUCKER CARLSON: They have a lot of experience policing big cities.

DOJ Lawyers with No Policing Experience

HARMEET DHILLON: They have no experience policing big cities. Some of them have probably never met a cop in the wild. These are lawyers from good schools, and they’re very idealistic, by the way. Most of them have never tried a case in their lives.

Of all the consent decrees that the United States Department of Justice has imposed, and there are dozens and dozens of them over the years, maybe hundreds, but certainly in recent decades, dozens per year in some years. And the Biden administration, they opened up a dozen investigations, and those are some of the ones that I’ve been examining since I got into office. They only took two of those cases to trial. In hundreds of instances of investigations, they lost one, and they lost the police part of the other one. There was a housing aspect of the second one, which they won.

So in all the years that you’ve read about Los Angeles and Albuquerque and Seattle and Portland and all of these cities being under consent decrees, no federal judge ever looked at the evidence and found that the United States Department of Justice actually proved their case that there was systemic racism or systemic improper training. It was lawyers like the ones I described earlier who don’t have much trial experience, looking at a dry paper record and by the way, over the last several years, sitting in their living room doing it because they were working from home during COVID.

So in their home, looking at paper and selectively cherry picking evidence from these records that they forced the cities to turn over, reaching conclusions, not reaching conclusions that a jury agreed with or that even a federal judge saw the evidence of, but simply bullying American cities into compliance and then presenting a fait accompli to a judge. And in some cases, most cases, the judges would say, okay, I agree.

What’s particularly shocking is in so many of the recent instances of police consent decrees in the United States, woke prosecutors in those cities and woke city councils and woke mayors went along with them. They wanted them because they too, don’t like the police. And so it has been a sort of perfect storm of the taxpayer having to pay for monitoring. Some fat cat lawyer gets a big contract that goes on for many years. And crime skyrockets in cities with consent decrees.

This is called the Ferguson Effect, after Ferguson, Missouri. When a city’s under a consent decree, cops have to suddenly fill out reams of paperwork every day. Guess what? They don’t want to do that. They didn’t become cops to sit there and do paperwork. So they quit. They retire, they move to cities where they do want policing to be done effectively. Crime goes up because criminals now know that the policing is not being done.

For example, and I’m not just saying this from a biased perspective, Axios did a review of cities under consent decrees and I think one of the figures is crime went up by 61% in Los Angeles county as a result after consent decrees were imposed on the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And so cities are less safe, cops are.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I just ask what… I mean, ultimately, you know, the purpose of a system is its effect. So you could say, well, people don’t, no one wants crime. But like over time, if the DOJ is causing more crime in America’s cities, they want more crime. Like what is that?

HARMEET DHILLON: You can just take the words of my predecessor at her own face value, which is, you know, defund the police. And so defund the police has become the mantra of so called law enforcement in the United States.

The Real Motive Behind DOJ Actions

TUCKER CARLSON: Any idea what the motive is there other than just to burn down the civilization?

HARMEET DHILLON: I mean, I don’t want to speculate about motives, but it has made our cities less safe. It has made us pay for the cities to become less safe. So that’s particularly galling. We have to pay some person eating at Morton’s on our dime and attending conferences on our dime. And cops who are people who put their lives on the line for us every day are made to feel ashamed of their jobs and America’s less safe.

There are bad cops, I want to be clear. There are cops who shoot people, and the DOJ also prosecutes those. To be clear, part of our job and the Civil Rights division is a criminal section that criminally prosecutes bad cops. I support that. I’ve signed off on several prosecutions so far since I’ve been there. And there’s trials going on right now. Cops who shoot somebody in the back and exhibit excessive force. But we also have to all be punished collectively, you know, back to the point of collective punishment. We all have to suffer because there’s one bad cop or two bad cops.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you imagine how many bad cops there are going to be soon? No normal person wants to be a cop. It’s too hard. It’s not worth it. You get imprisoned in a lot. Philadelphia. I was talking to a cop in Philadelphia last week. “I’m retiring. Everyone’s gone. Like you do anything and go right to jail. As a cop, if you enforce the law, you go to jail. It’s not worth it.”

Personal Experience with Police Inaction

HARMEET DHILLON: I’m one of the few lawyers who’s headed the Civil Rights Division who’s actually sued the police. And I did it from the opposite perspective of what is expected.

In 2016, I was at a Trump rally and there was a riot in San Jose. And it was an organized, well funded riot. I’m just a citizen going to support my candidate. I did the pledge of Allegiance. I met the future president backstage. And then all of us were subjected to mob violence. And what galled me was the police, 200 plus of them with riot gear just stood there and watched.

And I went and during the course of my lawsuit suing over the fact that American citizens were injured in a violent mob, I asked some of them, like, why was that? You get to the bottom of that lawsuit. And it turns out that because of consent decrees and best practices of policing that are coming down from Washington D.C. and the DOJ, the police are taught to basically, in a crowd control situation, stand there and watch and not do anything. So it’s so dishonorable, it is insane. I was truly shocked by that.

And so I have experience suing the police and trying to get them to improve their practices and be more aggressive on behalf of the taxpayers, which is the opposite of what they’re usually asked to do in these cases. And so we resolved that case with some agreements that they would do some training and be a little different than what they were.

Biden DOJ’s Last-Minute Actions

But what we’re seeing in the Biden DOJ, which again, I came in and I looked at the books here, is it’s striking that first of all, they took the four years to immediately began changing course, opening investigations that the Trump DOJ had closed and shut down. And then literally after the election, after the election where President Trump won in 2024, they filed several cases and made public several findings of fact in over 10 cities in the United States.

They hastily ran to court in December in Louisville, Kentucky, and in January, January 6th in Minneapolis, Minnesota to file new cases. You know, clearly at the tail end, they lost the election. They’re not going to be able to carry this through. But they wanted to make public these consent decrees.

So they put in front of two federal judges in these two cases in Minneapolis and Louisville these factual findings. Now, these factual findings are done by lawyers sitting in their living rooms on a dry paper record. And the findings are, you know, we have reason to believe that these cities engaged in racist policing and also violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

That’s a common theme running through the dozen or so consent decrees that I’ve reviewed at DOJ. So the idea is that if a drugged out or mentally ill person is the subject of a call to 911, somehow the police dispatcher is supposed to know, just based on a member of the public calling or somebody calling for help themselves, that they should have done what, I don’t know, dispatched a social worker instead of a cop to the scene after someone dies?

TUCKER CARLSON: Being addicted to illegal narcotics, disability, I…

HARMEET DHILLON: I mean, you might think so reading some of the factual facts.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are you being serious?

HARMEET DHILLON: I am serious. Based on the factual findings. I thought it was a crime, DOJ.

TUCKER CARLSON: Or a failing, at very least.

HARMEET DHILLON: Tucker, it’s a mental health issue and it’s a…

TUCKER CARLSON: Actually, so if I’m addicted to meth, I have special protection.

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, apparently the police dispatcher is supposed to know by that 911 call that they shouldn’t have sent a cop. They should have sent a social worker. I mean, it’s an infection.

TUCKER CARLSON: The federal government is doing that.

# The DOJ’s Assault on White Christians Is Worse Than You Think

The Problem with Consent Decrees

HARMEET DHILLON: The federal Government DOJ has been reaching those factual findings and then asking federal judges to impose thick decade-long, minutely detailed consent decrees out of which cities struggle to get out of. You know, the average consent decree, Tucker, when the United States Department of Justice bullies a city into agreeing to it is over a decade. So the problem isn’t solved quickly by all the taxpayer dollars, the monitor, the police reform, the community policing councils and groups that are set up in these consent decrees, the judge overseeing it, the problem that was identified isn’t solved.

In fact, it turns out that when you fund investigations and you fund monitoring and a monitor decides when you’re good enough and your performance has improved, you get more monitoring, you get more years of that, you get more fees paid to big law firms like Hogan Lovells and some other big law firms in the United States. And the citizens pay the bill. So it’s a tax on Americans who live in cities because one cop, or maybe no cops in some cases did something wrong. And so it’s a totally broken system.

When we came into office, it was a priority of this administration to review all pending consent decrees, all consent decrees that had yet to be entered by a judge, all pre-consent decree factual findings found by the Department of Justice and announced publicly shaming these cities and look at the data and see are these really justified? And our immediate conclusion, by the way, not just our conclusion. In the case of Minneapolis and Louisville, federal judges to which these were presented had some tough questions.

In the case of Louisville, the judge asked the DOJ lawyers, these DOJ lawyers I’ve described from the Civil Rights Division to explain themselves. How did you reach that conclusion? What are the data supporting your conclusion? How do you account for variables like what are the high crime areas? I mean, are the high crime areas racially different than the population of the city? These lawyers did not have answers. It was embarrassing. And so the judge refused to enter the consent decree in Louisville and sent the DOJ back and said, I need your answers. Guess what? This is days before the administration is about to turn over. So we’ve asked for a couple of continuances.

Proving Systemic Racism

TUCKER CARLSON: So what are the criteria that government lawyers use to like, reach the conclusion that there’s systemic racism that requires a consent decree? Like, I don’t really understand. Well, it’s one thing to say in an MSNBC segment there’s systemic racism, but if you’re a Civil Rights Division attorney, you have to prove it. Correct?

HARMEET DHILLON: You should have to prove it. But as I said, no jury has ever agreed with the message.

TUCKER CARLSON: Since racism is an attitude that has, you know, it can have manifestations, of course, but it’s, it’s really like a mindset. How do you, how do you prove that?

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, so we have, we have, of course, being the government, we have statisticians on our staff at the Department of Justice. As you know, I was surprised to show up. I was thinking, oh my gosh, let me look at all these lawyers. What is their trial experience? Oh, there’s a PhD in statistics here that’s going to be really useful in court. But they could be, by the way, there are cases properly deployed. They could be. But if you never have to prove your case, you never have to use them, you simply beat people over the head with a statistics book.

And so that’s what’s happened here. So I’ll give you an example. Memphis, Tennessee is one of the cities that the outgoing Department of Justice issued some pretty lurid looking factual findings in. And so when you start reading it, you look at, hey, the findings are, although Memphis is racist and you know, their arrest rates of African Americans are disproportionate.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry, let me just say, anyone who’s been to Memphis, been at such a wonderful place, I love Memphis. But if you come away thinking, you know, the real problem in Memphis is racism, then you’re a liar.

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, so Memphis is majority black.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

HARMEET DHILLON: The police force is majority black.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

HARMEET DHILLON: And guess what? The homeless population, which is the subject of this consent decree finding, pre-consent decree finding, is majority black. And so the idea that there’s disproportionate arrests of, you know, people who are on the street and, you know, potentially committing crimes is racist. Black cops, black population, and black homeless population. How do you reach that conclusion that racism. You have to reach that conclusion because you are biased yourself. And the lens that you’re looking through is a lens seeking racism. And if that’s what you’re seeking, that’s what you find in each of these cities. And that is what they found in each of these cities.

The Real Problems in Cities

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like the ANC or something. But, you know, in the end, like, Memphis also has not only the country’s highest murder rate or one of them the worst schools and like contaminated water and crumbling housing stock and like no businesses, and there’s so many problems. And if you just think it’s like white people are the problem, nothing ever gets fixed.

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, that’s the problem with these consent decrees. And so we examine these and look, one of the things people need to understand, as a lawyer, when I go into federal court, my name as the Assistant Attorney General for civil rights is on all of these documents that we file in court. Sometimes the attorney general’s name is on it as well, but my name is on all of these documents where we charge somebody. And I have to be able to say to the judge, look the judge in the eye and say, I believe in these findings of my Department of Justice civil rights division. Judge, I stand behind them and I’m confident that what we’re alleging in these papers is true.

Well, Tucker, I looked at these findings and I and the lawyers who report to me in the DOJ said we cannot stand behind these conclusions. I can’t stand in front of a judge with a straight face and say that Memphis’s problems are racist cops. I mean, they’re not racist. They simply are dealing with a population that happens to have a particular racial makeup. The conclusions are not correcting for that. The conclusions are not correcting for what neighborhoods have crime. There’s cherry picking of statistics. There’s imposing Americans with Disabilities act layers onto these consent decrees that don’t exist in the law. The Americans with Disabilities act does not impose on police requirements of how they respond to 911 calls. It just doesn’t.

So wishing it were so does not make it so. And so what’s happening is these cities are having to agree to these things because they’re afraid of the consequences or they have a woke city council that wants the hands of the police to be tied. That’s the most corrupt thing, is the cities were basically begging for these consent decrees to be entered. And you know, in the case of Louisville, we’re dismissing Louisville.

Cities Begging for Punishment

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s so weird. You’re a city councilman in a city and you want the crime rate to go up. Like, what is that? I think it’s the weirdest, most suicidal thing I’ve ever seen.

HARMEET DHILLON: No one’s talking about it until we started looking at these. And so we’re dismissing and withdrawing the Minneapolis and the Louisville consent decrees that were put in front of federal judges just a few months ago. We don’t have confidence in them. We are telling judges that this is not something that the DOJ can stand behind now in each of these cities.

By the way, Louisville has already agreed to hire its own police monitor without the DOJ forcing them to do it. I mean, that’s not my business. I wouldn’t necessarily think that the problem goes to that degree. Someone’s friend who’s a lawyer is probably going to get paid out of that, and good for them. But in Minneapolis’s case, Minneapolis has already entered into a state consent decree. So why are they still, you know, going along with this federal one? Well, they thought the federal one would be worse and more onerous. And so Minneapolis has publicly stated that they’re going to oppose the Department of Justice’s attempts to dismiss the case against the city. Believe that or not, that is, like.

TUCKER CARLSON: The craziest thing I’ve ever heard.

HARMEET DHILLON: I mean, you would think as a city leader, your job is first to protect your city and then deal with your problems yourself, which they’re already doing in Minneapolis.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re begging to be punished by the feds for crimes that they probably didn’t commit.

HARMEET DHILLON: Not even crimes. Just, you know, sort of reason to believe that the police practices are improper or inadequate.

TUCKER CARLSON: But they want to be punished. Spank me harder, Daddy.

HARMEET DHILLON: I want to put words into their mouths. But their actions are that they would oppose the DOJ letting them sort it out themselves. I mean, it is what it is. So not every city is like that and not every municipality is like that. There are six other jurisdictions that the DOJ issued findings in that were withdrawing.

The Corrupt Monitoring System

HARMEET DHILLON: Look, I knew that consent decrees were an abusive process. I did not realize the extent to which there was collusion in this process. I mean, we have perpetual monitors who have made decades of their lives getting paid up. Like there’s one which a city that just closed up its consent decree. DOJ dismissed it after a decade. A single man got paid a million dollars a year to monitor. A year, a year to monitor a city’s compliance with a DOJ consent decree.

That went on and on and on. And, you know, these consent decree monitors set compliance rates of 95% or 100%. And it’s like, it’s like Zeno’s paradox. You know, you never actually reach 100% because you never reach 94%. You never reach 95%. The judge is a guy getting paid to determine the outcome. And it is a broken system.

Some of these consent decree monitors have fake companies, shell companies that haven’t been registered with any state. Some of them have fake nonprofits that aren’t really nonprofits. They sell themselves and, you know, there’s never any accountability. And so at a minimum, what we’re doing for all of these existing consent decrees as well is to look at these monitors. Are they real? What goals have they accomplished in a decade? Are things better in that city? Are the people safer? What are we getting in exchange?

Some of these consent decrees, Tucker, cost cities over the course of this 10 years. Just forget the monitor who’s getting paid 10 million bucks on average. $200 million in some cases is what it costs a city or a county to comply with a decade long consent decree because they have to do all these endless trainings and they have to fill out all these forms. The Department of Justice in the last four years has spent 65,000 hours in the civil rights division, which only had about 60 lawyers. So tens of thousands of hours monitoring these consent decrees. I mean, it is a mind boggling volume of waste.

TUCKER CARLSON: So in the end, the lawyers get rich and more people get shot to death.

HARMEET DHILLON: That is correct. That is the average outcome of a consent decree.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wow, it’s just so evil. It makes you think like maybe we just burned the system down and start again.

# Addressing Consent Decrees and Police Department Oversight

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, what we’re doing is one by one looking at every existing consent decree. And I haven’t gotten through all of them. But, you know, we got to the point where six weeks in, I said, look, we have to put a stop to these.

Phoenix, Arizona, we’re dismissing the findings, we’re withdrawing the findings in our pre-consent decree efforts there. Mount Vernon, New York, a tiny police department with, I would say a couple of practices that I wouldn’t necessarily agree are the best practices. But you know, they’ve also agreed to stop doing them. So why is the federal Government getting involved in putting together thick reports? Oklahoma City is another one. Trenton, New Jersey is another one. The Mississippi Police Department is another one. The Mississippi state police is another one. And then we have Memphis, which we already discussed.

In some cases, these cities didn’t go along with them. They fought the DOJ. So, good for them having some integrity in their city government. I’ve heard from members of Congress in some of these jurisdictions who said this consent decree is simply… I mean, I’ll give you the example of Phoenix.

Phoenix seems to be an attempt by the Department of Justice to go after a sort of purple reddish jurisdiction and hold them accountable for trying to impose quality of life standards. For example, Phoenix has been called to account in the DOJ report that we’re withdrawing as part of my investigation for moving the homeless along. And what law do they cite in this consent decree analysis? They cite the Boise, Idaho case that people are familiar with, where the court, the Ninth Circuit, held that it was unconstitutional for Boise to try to move homeless people off the street unless you had a nice housing to put them in.

Well, the United States Supreme Court reversed that, and so they reversed it in the Grants Pass case. So we’re even today in the DOJ’s recent consent decree work, simply ignoring binding Supreme Court precedent that says that what the police were doing in Phoenix is okay under the law and hoping to simply bully them into compliance. This is not what our federal government want.

TUCKER CARLSON: More people living on the sidewalk like this is… If you take three steps back, it’s like so dark, so diseased. You want more violent crime, you want more drug abuse, you want more people living on the street. Why would you want any of that?

HARMEET DHILLON: Why would any elected official of any party want that in the United States in 2025? Well, I don’t get it. And so in these eight cases, we’re getting rid of them. And there will be more, I’m confident.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s interesting. I mean, I didn’t know any of this, but it’s part of the explanation for why we have more of all of those things. You look around, you’re like, I don’t recognize this. Like, I grew up here. We never had any of this. Why do we have it now? And part of the answer, clearly is what you’re describing, which is an attempt by elements of the Department of Justice to create these outcomes.

Corruption in the Consent Decree System

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, and on top of that, there’s some corrupt rent seeking as well. Let’s just call it what it is. There are these white shoe lawyers. One was thrown out of a casino earlier this year, a prominent lawyer at a major law firm was thrown out of a casino. He was intoxicated. When the police came, he said, “I’m with the DOJ. I’m the police monitor and so you can’t touch me.”

Other cities have reported to U.S. lawyers, my colleagues in the DOJ, that if you dare complain about my bills, I’m going to keep you under a consent decree longer. I mean, it’s that level of shakedown.

TUCKER CARLSON: My bills, as in billing as they payment to me, my billing?

HARMEET DHILLON: Yeah. When the bills are questioned, the city gets punished harder. So, you would hope judges are looking at these things carefully. Guess what? Judges are busy. And judges are not looking at them that carefully.

TUCKER CARLSON: So just to be clear, you have half of your staff attorney positions unfilled because you don’t have the budget to hire new lawyers, ones who might actually want to follow the law. But we somehow have the money, even post-DOJ to pay monitors a million dollars a year to oversee arrangements that lead to more violent crime.

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, the monitors are not being paid by the DOJ. They’re being paid by the cities. So the cities that are under the lens of the DOJ are having these costs imposed on them. And there’s, like I said, no accountability.

There are annual conferences of the judges who impose the consent decrees, of the monitors who enjoy the fees and don’t solve the problem, and the city officials who think it’s all kind of a game. Let’s have community policing and let’s have a bunch of random people who have no background in dealing with crime tell the police what to do. There’s annual junkets. It’s an industry. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry making America more unsafe for the most part.

TUCKER CARLSON: Does anyone ever consider the fact that violent crime causes racism? Actually, I mean, that’s just true. When people are afraid, first of all, people are afraid, they become much less reasonable. I think everybody does. It’s just like a human response, right?

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, people are afraid in American cities.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

Individual Responsibility vs. Collective Punishment

HARMEET DHILLON: And we have been made to believe that riots like after the Minneapolis incident with George Floyd, like the regrettable incident where Breonna Taylor was shot, by the way, my department is prosecuting the two cops who lied to get a no-knock warrant in that case. I mean, that is a serious offense and we’re going to hold those individuals accountable, which is different than holding the whole city of Louisville and all the taxpayers in that city accountable for mistakes that were allegedly made by two individuals.

So, what a concept, individual responsibility for individual mistakes. And so we do that regularly in each of these jurisdictions, Tucker, where the DOJ has been examining these police departments, there have been police misconduct cases and cops have been punished either at the state level or at the federal level. That’s appropriate. They’re bad actors in every industry and you know, media and law and medicine.

But asking cops, as a matter of a multi-hundred page consent decree to sort of be doctors and predict Americans with Disabilities Act outcomes, adverse outcomes, is just insane. And it doesn’t work. And you know, let’s face it, if lawyers were any good at organic chemistry, they wouldn’t be lawyers, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: No, that’s right.

HARMEET DHILLON: I mean, the government cannot be the be-all and end-all solution to all social ills. And this is an example.

TUCKER CARLSON: And so is there anything you can do about the consent decrees already in place?

HARMEET DHILLON: We are examining them and we’re going to be bringing to the attention of judges inappropriate conduct by monitors. The one I just mentioned is one who is ripe to be mentioned to a judge as someone committing misconduct. Monitors who claim to have nonprofits or corporations, but they don’t. We’re going to be bringing those to the attention of a judge.

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought the legal profession was self-policing through the bar. I don’t understand why nobody is ever disbarred except for like representing Donald Trump. I don’t understand that. Where is the bar? The state bars?

HARMEET DHILLON: You raise a very good question and the question I’ve raised myself. And so we have today in 2025 lawyers who have been or are under prosecution. I mean, this is happening in Arizona and Nevada and other jurisdictions, California or a bar complaint for who they represented. You’re absolutely right. And what arguments they made, even privately to their client and not even in front of a judge. John Eastman is an example of that and so many others.

And yet you have corrupt monitors who are holding cities hostage effectively and all the taxpayers in those cities for their personal benefit. And then you have city councils who are elected to represent the people and instead they would like to see the cops handcuffed and see the streets burning in their cities.

This is a lack of accountability. It is a broken system. And at least the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is not going to be participating in making that broken system worse under President Trump’s leadership and under our current attorney general.

TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing.

HARMEET DHILLON: I know, what a concept, right?

Future Focus on Religious Liberty

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s an amazing story. I didn’t even know that was happening, but it explains a lot. So basically you just got there to run this division six weeks ago. It’s incredible. So there’s probably so many things that you’re looking at that you want to examine that have been going on that most people, including me, didn’t know about. What are some of those things?

HARMEET DHILLON: Well, there are 11 sections in the Civil Rights division. And some of the things that we’re going to be looking at in coming weeks and months include the rampant anti-Christian bias happening throughout the United States. And so there’s anti-Christian bias happening within the government. There are chaplains in the military who are told to tone down their Christianity under the prior administration. And that’s insane.

In America, we’re founded on religious liberty and specifically the Protestants who came here to be able to practice their faith freely. And so we’re bringing back a focus on that. There’s a law called RLUIPA, and it’s important for all people of faith in America.

TUCKER CARLSON: I totally agree.

HARMEET DHILLON: To be able to worship. And so we are bringing a number of cases under what’s called a Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which is when jurisdictions are discriminating on the basis of zoning against houses of worship. Be they Christian, Jewish, Muslim or any.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s right.

HARMEET DHILLON: That’s happening throughout the United States.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t like it when they hassle the Scientologists. I don’t. I didn’t like it when they hassled the Orthodox Jews in Borough Park during COVID. It’s not about… I’m not, you know, Jewish or Scientologist. But like I agree with you, people of faith have an interest in religious freedom, period.

HARMEET DHILLON: And we have a federal law that gives them higher than First Amendment protection. That law that I mentioned. And so we’re going after Forestburg, New York. We’re going after other jurisdictions that are doing this. And so we are going after discrimination in employment, like the Chicago cases.

People have been texting me all in the last 24-48 hours since we started this investigation, giving me other examples of other cities doing the exact same thing. So we have a lot of work cut out for us.

The DOJ civil rights generally covers, not exclusively, but generally covers government discrimination. I mean, occasionally it will verge into private discrimination. Colorado is forcing a Christian camp to supposedly allow boys to be in the girls changing rooms. That’s a violation of the religious liberty of the kids and the families going to that Christian camp.

We’re going to be going after schools that try to take from parents their natural, God-given and constitutional right to control their children’s education, be it with sexualized curricula or transgenderism. That’s happening in our schools throughout the United States from the most unlikely places.

And you know, I kind of joke I’ll start the day at 8 o’clock in the morning or earlier sometimes. And throughout the day, one or the other of my deputies jumps into my office and I’m like, “Oh, what fresh hell is this?” The sheer volume of violations of our civil rights happening by the state and local petty bureaucrats and wrong-minded private people throughout the United States is overwhelming sometimes.

So if I had 400 lawyers plus at my disposal to go after them, we would keep them busy doing good work for the American people all day long.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think you’re a hero, Harmeet. And I will say you’re one of the only people in all of Washington DC who doesn’t really want to be invited to POLITICO’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner Party.

HARMEET DHILLON: And I wasn’t invited and that’s okay because I’m too busy working and knitting in my spare time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Great. Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General of the United States.

HARMEET DHILLON: Thank you.

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