What Harmeet Dhillon left out of her resignation letter
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As the Department of Justice filed a flurry of lawsuits in the final weeks before the election to derail vote counting and certification, something was off. On my daily podcasts, I repeatedly asked: Where is Harmeet Dhillon?
Dhillon was the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights and a former Republican election lawyer. She was the architect of DOJ’s failed lawsuits to gain access to state voter files. And yet, in the homestretch, she was missing from the biggest cases.
Finally, the mystery has been solved.
We now know that in early October, Dhillon told the White House she planned to leave after the election. Yesterday, she formally resigned.
Now the question is, what happened to one of Donald Trump’s staunchest promoters of disenfranchisement?
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When Donald Trump prepared to take office for the second time, he made clear that he wanted the Department of Justice to serve his personal agenda. And nothing was more important to him than vindicating his discredited theory of election denialism.
This required transforming the Civil Rights Division into an attack dog that would limit voting rights rather than protect them. The person he chose to lead this effort was Dhillon.
When he nominated her in December 2024, he described her as “one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.” While Trump may have overstated her reputation slightly, there is no question that Dhillon lent an air of respectability to the election-denier cause.
A California lawyer with strong Republican Party credentials, she carried less baggage than those closely associated with Trump’s 2020 post-election debacle. For a while, Dhillon seemed perfectly positioned to succeed in the new MAGA administration.
Yet from the beginning, Dhillon ran into problems.
Her signature legal effort was obtaining complete voter data from every state. When 30 states and the District of Columbia refused, she sued them. These cases did not go well for her.
By Election Day, DOJ had lost 27 of those cases in district court and won none. It also lost the only appeals court ruling. The losses included more than a dozen defeats before Republican-appointed federal judges, nine of them appointed by Trump himself. DOJ was having scarcely more luck defending against lawsuits challenging the administration’s efforts to restrict voting by executive order.
Taken together, DOJ’s voting litigation resembled the same failed scheme Trump’s private lawyers launched after the 2020 election. As the defeats mounted, it seemed clear that something would have to change.
It seems that “something” was Dhillon.
Yesterday, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that he had accepted her resignation. Dhillon’s letter to Trump, which lists her achievements, makes no mention of the voter roll lawsuits.
The only election-related accomplishment she cites is her deployment of election monitors. After much excitement, this too seemed to have fizzled in the end.
With Dhillon’s resignation made public, attention immediately turned to the reason for her exit.
Some suggested she might have jumped off a sinking ship of increasingly desperate, losing voting cases demanded by the White House. As I noted above, her name was conspicuously absent from the pleadings filed in California seeking to set aside 20,000 ballots, and in Alaska, where DOJ wanted to dictate certification.
The other possibility was that she was pushed out for leading a failed legal effort to achieve Trump’s election goals. Given her dismal record in court, this too seemed plausible.
Then, late in the day, CBS News reported a third possibility: that Trump demanded she be fired after watching her brief appearance on “60 Minutes” in mid-October, feeling she had not been forceful enough.
In most respects, the interview was standard fare. Dhillon toed the White House line on distrust in elections and noncitizen voting. While Trump may have wanted something more conspiratorial, she suggested that unspecified “irregularities” had marred past elections.
What I suspect landed her in trouble was this exchange:
Lesley Stahl: What I’m hearing you say is that you think it’s very unlikely that a vote, a state vote, will be challenged. But people worry about that. Can you rule it out?
Harmeet Dhillon: Well, I don’t know what is going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states.
The problem for Dhillon is that by the time the interview aired, DOJ had already sued California to force an “interruption in the usual course of counting” ballots in that state. Indeed, DOJ was insisting that state and local officials ignore state law and set aside ballots from 20,000 people the administration had identified as potential noncitizens.
Meanwhile, DOJ was on the verge of filing an even more outrageous lawsuit that sought to block Alaska from certifying its Senate results if Trump’s preferred candidate lost.
In Trump’s orbit, it is impossible to know what really motivates hirings and firings. Dhillon, for her part, told Fox News she was not asked to resign. The truth may lie somewhere in between.
Dhillon may have been less effective than Trump wanted and more principled than he would tolerate. She may have had red lines she would not cross, in public or in private.
Either way, her legacy will be that of someone who came to DOJ to do Trump’s bidding and fell out of favor when she failed. In that, she joins a long list of others who have learned that with Trump, loyalty is a one-way street.