Harmeet Dhillon demonstrates danger of posting through it
When being terminally online goes wrong.
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"Portland: It's FO time. Buckle up."
On October 3, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, vowed to avenge a right-wing activist who’d been arrested there the night before. She accused police of discriminating against him based on his “conservative” viewpoint.
But last week Judge Michael Simon called her out for her ”threat and attempted intimidation” of officials in Portland, Oregon, refusing to allow his court to be used as a vehicle to punish a blue state for daring to stare down the Trump administration.
The case highlights the abject disintegration of the Justice Department under the leadership of internet-poisoned ideologues who think Elon Musk’s house of horrors is real life. And yet being terminally online is their Achilles heel, constantly undermining their quest to weaponize government against their so-called enemies.
Civil rights are woke
Under Dhillon’s leadership, the Civil Rights Division has shrunk by about 75 percent and now devotes most of its energy to harassing trans students and attempting to bully election officials into handing over state voter rolls.
But back in 2012, when it was run by people who actually cared about doing the job, the Civil Rights Division sued Portland, alleging a “pattern or practice” of excessive force by local police against people with mental illness.
That lawsuit resulted in a 2014 settlement agreement in which the Portland Police Bureau committed to a set of reforms and ongoing monitoring, supervised by the court.
It was one of many such consent decrees entered into by the Obama and Biden Justice Departments. But during both of his terms in office, Trump has worked to dismantle them. One of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s first orders of business was attempting to end the consent decree in Baltimore inked after police killed Freddy Gray. And in 2025, Bondi tore up consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville entered into after police murdered Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
“The weaponization of consent decrees ended when I took over this @CivilRights Division,” Dhillon crowed on social media. “Under @AGPanBondi’s leadership, we support our law enforcement and we are terminating outdated consent decrees. Less red tape, more safety!”
But after Trump’s immigration surge, she took a different tack with Portland.
Crisis monetization
Last summer and fall, the Department of Homeland Security descended on city after city, grabbing non-white people off the streets and deliberately antagonizing residents. The widespread protests were almost uniformly peaceful, but Trump cited sporadic violence as a reason to unleash the military on America’s streets.
On September 27, he announced he was sending troops to "War ravaged Portland" to deal with the massive protests against his deportation dragnet. Over the governor’s objection, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued an order to federalize 200 Oregon National Guard troops the next day.
The protests were a magnet for right-wing influencers looking to monetize the conflict by making incendiary online content. One such interloper was Nick Sortor, a self described “conservative journalist” whose entire schtick is to show up and provoke the antifa/Somalis/leftists and then play the victim.
On October 2, he got what he was looking for in Portland, and was arrested after a scuffle with a woman in a chicken costume. The following week he was a guest at the White House, where he brought a flag he claimed to have rescued from the “violence.”
Although Sortor was never charged, his case became an immediate rallying cry for the right … and for the DOJ.
Dhillon’s “FO” post was a retweet of Sortor boasting that Attorney General Bondi had personally called him to guarantee that “The Trump DOJ WILL NOT allow Portland Police to continue to do the bidding of Antifa.”
The suggestion that cops in Portland are taking instruction from antifa is beyond ridiculous. For years protesters have complained about police brutality and PPB’s refusal to block marauding gangs of Proud Boys rampaging in the streets.
Nonetheless, just three hours later, Dhillon posted a letter she’d sent to officials in Portland demanding details of Sortor’s arrest and accusing PPB of viewpoint discrimination in violation of the 2014 settlement agreement.
“Portland: Signed, sealed, delivered!” she tweeted.
By coincidence — or not — that very same day, Judge Karin Immergut was holding a hearing on the federalization of Oregon’s guardsmen. Relying in part on sworn declarations from PPB’s assistant chief and a commander that there was no actual breakdown of the law necessitating federal intervention, she enjoined Hegseth from calling up Oregon’s militia. That injunction was later blocked by the Ninth Circuit, but not before Dhillon had endorsed a call to impeach Judge Immergut, a Trump appointee.
On October 29, the DOJ sent a second letter to Portland with another 22 intrusive demands, such as “staffing data by shift and district since June 1, 2025” and “arrests, stops, and calls data and reports by shift and district since June 1, 2025.” When Portland failed to comply, Dhillon filed a motion to enforce the settlement agreement in Judge Simon’s court on November 24.
Twelve days later, she posted a video of herself denouncing “woke” settlement agreements. (Watch below.)
Trying to force a city to send social workers instead of cops when a mentally ill person creates a ruckus or threatens somebody? This is all nonsense. This is not how we should be making our laws in this country, from DC, from a bunch of woke, liberal law school graduates sitting in offices having not confronted the facts on the ground. And so, whenever we’re dismissing these types of cases, it’s really met with a lot of relief and gratitude from local and state law enforcement.
Irony is truly dead.
Unclean hands
Portland and the PPB opposed the government’s effort to weaponize the consent decree in support of a conservative “journalist,” and obviously Dhillon’s X account featured heavily in their pleadings.
“DOJ does not have a good faith concern that the City has engaged in a pattern or practice of viewpoint discrimination against journalists. The federal government is the one providing preferential treatment and access to journalists and influencers who share its viewpoints,” the city argued. “The Court need only look to AAG Dhillon’s many social media posts to see DOJ’s true motivation.”
They point out that the settlement agreement only covers police interactions with people having mental health crises, and that when outside groups sought to expand it to cover racial disparities in policing, the government successfully argued that this was outside the scope of the case. But now Dhillon, who scorns the very idea of consent decrees, is trying to leverage the one in Portland to pry loose state police records.
The hypocrisy was too much for Judge Simon.
“The Court denies the United States’ motion to enforce on the grounds that the Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the United States has brought this motion in bad faith and with unclean hands,” he wrote on Friday.
He pointed to the coincidence of timing with the National Guard case: “To the Court, this reasonably appears to be a not-so-subtle signal from the United States Department of Justice to the Portland Police Bureau that if it continued to assist the plaintiffs in the case of Oregon v. Trump, the United States Department of Justice could make matters quite difficult, burdensome, and expensive for the Portland Police Bureau.”
And he called out Dhillon’s demand to impeach Judge Immergut and her “FO” tweet.
“That is neither language nor tone of a good faith investigation by the United States Department of Justice. Instead, it exhibits all the hallmarks of a threat and attempted intimidation,” he wrote.
In a long footnote, Judge Simon points out that he’s far from the only judge to conclude that, under Trump, the Justice Department has forfeited the presumption of regularity it enjoyed for generations. Court after court has called out the DOJ for its brazen mendacity and lack of candor. Dhillon live-tweeting her every retaliatory move on social media is just the cherry on top.
The judge refused to allow the consent decree, which was meant to protect individuals with mental health issues from police violence, to be perverted to punish the Portland Police Bureau for “discriminating” against a conservative agitator. He accused the head of the Civil Division of seeking to intimidate a federal judge. And, in an order which will certainly become a touchstone for his fellow jurists, he cited the government’s own social media posts as dispositive evidence undermining its in-court claims.
FO time, indeed.
That’s it for today
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