Jamie Raskin’s Trump Obsession Trumps Antisemitism
“Breaking News.” That’s how The Washington Post begins the story whose headline read, “The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower.”
“Little to no evidence of systemic abuse,” you say? According to a “whistleblower,” forsooth. More like a “whistling-in-the-wind blower.” You can read the 25-page complaint here. It posted on August 17. The next day, Johnny on the Spot “I-Hate-Trump” Rep. Jamie Raskin was on the case with a seven-page screed addressed to Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Is “screed” too strong? You tell me. Here’s a sample:
[Y]our “investigation” into antisemitism was fake, a pre-baked frame-up operation thoroughly political in nature, Before an actual investigation took place and regardless of what you actually found, the whole project was designed to harass professors and administrators at major universities, to curtail their freedom of speech and academic freedom, and to strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants that they had already been awarded on the merits of their applications. This sham investigation is and will remain a shameful stain on the record of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Civil Rights Division and represents a clear and present danger to American academic preeminence in the world.
“A shameful stain!” “A clear and present danger!” Can anyone take this joker seriously?
The intemperate rhetoric may be necessary, however. It’s a tricky task Raskin has set himself. He has to pound antisemitism sufficiently while at the same time giving credence to that “little to no evidence of systemic abuse” claimed by the whistleblower. Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Cicero might have been able to pull it off. Jamie Raskin, not so much.
Oh yes, quoth Raskin, antisemitism at American university is “real.” (Thanks, pal.) But ooooo, that horrible man Trump has used antisemitism as a “pretext” for “retaliating against, and punishing, universities, faculty, and students for engaging in protected speech.”
“Protected speech,” you say? Is occupying college buildings “speech,” protected or otherwise? Is threatening Jewish students and faculty “protected speech”? Is destroying college property or kidnapping janitors?
Raskin and his whistleblowers have a logical problem. They want to acknowledge the sudden rise in antisemitism—not to do so would lose them public support—but they can’t bear to acknowledge that Donald Trump was doing something about it. So they tie themselves into knots, claiming that the administration went after Columbia, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions not because of the flagrant (“systemic”?) antisemitism but because Trump doesn’t like free speech/education/the ivy league/whatever.
The timing of the one-two whistleblower/Raskin punch is worth noting, too. Just a few days earlier, on August 14, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Harvard for failing to address antisemitism on its campus. The Trump administration is appealing the ruling and it might well win on appeal. But the dismissal now provides some much-needed cover for wheeling out the word “pretext.”
But what about the pretext for Raskin’s broadside against the DOJ? What about that whistleblower complaint? That was the predicate for the media assault and Raskin’s high horse. What should we think of it? We should think poorly of it. Some enterprising blogger asked Grok about whether its framing of the situation in places like Columbia, Harvard, and Penn was convincing. Here, in part, is what Grok said:
After October 7, 2023, campuses—especially elite ones—saw a sharp, measurable spike in anti-Israel and antisemitic activity. ADL tracked thousands of incidents (assault, harassment, vandalism, disruptive protests, BDS pushes) in 2023–24, with Columbia frequently ranking at or near the top, followed by schools including Harvard. Encampments spread to over 100–160 campuses; some involved building occupations (Hamilton Hall at Columbia), property damage, and explicit chants supporting Hamas or calling for the destruction of Israel/Zionism. Jewish students reported exclusion from spaces, harassment, and fear of identifying as Jewish or Zionist at high rates—surveys showed majorities experiencing or witnessing antisemitism, with particularly hostile environments documented at Columbia, Penn, and others.
University leadership’s response was widely seen as inadequate until external pressure mounted. The December 2023 House hearing featuring the presidents of Harvard (Claudine Gay), Penn (Liz Magill), and MIT produced the viral exchange in which they refused clear answers on whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated campus rules—“it depends on the context.” Magill and Gay resigned amid the fallout. Columbia’s Minouche Shafik faced her own hearing later. Faculty involvement was not marginal: departments issued one-sided statements, some professors celebrated or contextualized the October 7 attacks, and long-standing patterns in Middle East studies and related fields treated Israel as uniquely illegitimate while soft-pedaling or ignoring far larger conflicts and atrocities elsewhere. Tenure and institutional culture limited accountability.
“Little to no evidence of systemic abuse?”
Perhaps the single best analysis of the Whistleblower complaint was a thread on X by Mark Goldfeder, Director of the National Jewish Advocacy Center. Goldfeder’s commentary is not only astute but also amusing. He identifies the “core complaint” thus: “Career attorneys [at the DOJ] were reassigned to work they didn’t choose, on timelines they didn’t like, and leadership overruled their recommendations. In most workplaces this is called Tuesday.”
“The disclosure,” Goldfeder continues,
measures everything against “longstanding investigative practices.” It never asks what those practices produced for Jewish students: complaints aging in queues while encampments grew and students were told to stay home for their own safety.
The longstanding practice was non-enforcement with excellent paperwork. [Bingo!]
Read the disclosure’s own facts without its adjectives. She flagged First Amendment issues in the Columbia findings; the general counsel’s office removed them. She objected to a witness list; it was negotiated down. That’s not a predetermined outcome, that’s a review process.
Then Goldfeder moves in for the kill. “Run the substitution test,” he says. What if we substituted the adjective “black” for “Jewish”? What then? What if this were a case of black students complaining for years about harassment only to find, with Trump, that the law was suddenly being enforced? Would Jamie Raskin be doing his imitation of the thunder god? We would be hailing whistleblowers? On the contrary. We would, as Goldfeder observes, ask what took them so long. The bottom line:
The real scandal preserved in this document is sixty years old, and it’s not the one on the cover page. These members of Congress want to investigate whether the government moved too fast for Jewish students. Nobody ever convened a hearing on why it moved not at all. That asymmetry is the whole story, and no whistleblower has come forward about it yet.
Nor will one. And for that, Goldfeder concludes, “Shame on them.”
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