Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s Assistant Attorney General Pick, Has a History of Attacking Voting Rights
President-elect Donald Trump announced Monday that he’s nominating conservative lawyer and former California GOP vice chair Harmeet Dhillon as the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Trump made the announcement on his social media platform TruthSocial, writing that, throughout her career, Dhillon “has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers.” He also noted she “is one of the top Election lawyers in the Country, fighting to ensure that all, and ONLY, legal votes are counted.”
Through her work with the law firm that she founded in 2006, Dhillon has become one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country. In the past few years, Dhillon — or an attorney from her law firm — has been involved in more than a dozen different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes or Trump’s efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election, according to Democracy Docket’s litigation tracker.
But beyond her legal work, Dhillon has emerged as a loyal ally of Trump — and a mouthpiece for right-wing conspiracy theories and talking points. She also founded the nonprofit legal organization the Center for American Liberty (CAL) in 2018 with the stated mission of “defending the civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.” Since its founding, CAL has been a source of controversy for Dhillon. The Guardian exposed that CAL was paying the Dhillon Law Group for legal work — an arrangement that raised eyebrows among ethics experts.
Dhillon also has ties to the controversial legal activist Leonard Leo. According to research from the investigative watchdog Accountable.US, Dhillon was also chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association the same year that the Dhillon Law Group was a $10,000 “gold sponsor” of its annual national policy conference. The only other “gold”-level sponsor last year was the Leo-backed Concord Fund, sometimes known as the Judicial Crisis Network.
Most recently, Dhillon represented Trump and various GOP plaintiffs and defendants in election-related cases throughout the ‘23-’24 election cycle — including defending Trump against the various state efforts to have him removed from the ballot for violating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. When the Colorado GOP asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in on the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to disqualify former Trump from appearing on the state’s primary ballot, Dhillon tweeted how “Democrats are conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history.” As the assistant attorney general for civil rights, her role, as Trump wrote, will be to “enforce our Civil Rights and Election Laws FAIRLY and FIRMLY.”