In a no-holds-barred interview with Tucker Carlson, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, now leading the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, pulled back the curtain on what she describes as the deeply ideological rot embedded in the DOJ—and the astonishing reaction of its entrenched liberal staff when the Trump administration took the reins.
Dhillon, a longtime conservative attorney and Trump ally, told Carlson that the Civil Rights Division—long viewed as one of the DOJ’s most ideologically liberal strongholds—essentially staged a bureaucratic revolt when it became clear the new administration planned to steer the division in a different direction.
“When I showed up—or when the president was elected, I should say—there were over 400 attorneys and about 200 staff, so a total of 600 people,” Dhillon explained. “Many of them had a particular agenda, and they weren’t shy about expressing their resistance.”
That resistance, she said, was not merely procedural pushback or internal debate. It manifested as mass resignations, press leaks, and emotional meltdowns.
In a particularly eye-opening segment, Dhillon recounted how remaining DOJ attorneys held “crying sessions”—emotional safe-space-like gatherings designed for staff to air grievances about the incoming administration’s shift in direction.
“They began having unhappy hours… struggle sessions, crying sessions,” she said. “They invited political supervisors to these events to make it clear they were miserable.”
Carlson, in response, called it a prime example of the “deep state in action,” describing the entrenched, unelected bureaucratic apparatus as impervious to democratic oversight.
“That’s the problem right there,” he said. “Elections have no effect. These people act independently of the democratic system.”
What Dhillon describes isn’t just workplace discontent. It’s open ideological warfare inside a critical wing of the federal government. The Civil Rights Division, tasked with enforcing some of the most consequential laws related to voting rights, discrimination, and religious liberties, has become a battleground where career attorneys—many of them left-leaning—refused to accept the outcomes of democratic elections.
“They began leaking to the press,” Dhillon said. “They didn’t even try to hide it.”
These revelations, while shocking, line up with long-standing concerns from conservatives that the DOJ has become politicized, especially in areas involving race, religion, and identity-based enforcement. The idea that civil service employees are staging emotional protests because of a change in administration is more than a cultural oddity—it’s a constitutional crisis in miniature.
For Trump supporters, the episode underscores why the restructured Department of Government Ethics (DOGE) and similar reforms were so essential. The reality Dhillon outlines suggests that without structural change, federal agencies can be hijacked by activist agendas that endure long after voters cast their ballots.
Her story also offers a rare insider look at how embedded ideological resistance doesn’t just slow policy—it undermines it at the source, making meaningful reform virtually impossible without a purge of personnel or a complete realignment of incentives.
