There's currently a rebellion brewing in the Department of Justice over its leaders' mishandling of the brazen murder committed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
In response to Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon's insane directives that the Division would not investigate the ICE agent who committed the murder but would investigate the victim and her wife to see if they belonged to any protest groups, at least ten officials – four of the leading lawyers at the Civil Rights Division and another six prosecutors at the US Attorney's Office in Minneapolis – have submitted resignations today.
This isn't the first time that we've seen lawyers at the Civil Rights Division resign their positions in protest rather than comply with partisan political directives that contradict the mission of the agency.
In the brief epilogue to my manuscript on John Doar and the Civil Rights Division in the 1960s, I describe in short order similar revolts that took place under Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush.
I'm reluctant to share a rough first draft like this, but I do think this information might be useful for reporters who are trying to put today's events in context, so here they are. As you'll see, there's a longer pattern here of conservatives twisting the CRD in reactionary directions, and yet the brazen changes under Trump in this second term still stand out.
First, the revolt under Nixon:
After Nixon’s victory [in the 1968 election], most observers assumed that the new White House would lead a sharp retreat on civil rights.
In practice, however, the new administration initially adopted a diversified approach to the subject that confused its supporters and detractors alike. This confusion was deliberate. As his top domestic adviser John Ehrlichmann noted, Nixon’s administration intentionally advanced “some non-conservative initiatives” in the realm of civil rights that were “deliberately designed to furnish some zigs to go along with our conservative zags” in order to convince the nation they had a “centerist strategy.” Prominent racial liberals in the GOP were given key Cabinet posts, such as Michigan’s Governor George Romney as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and California’s Lieutenant Governor Robert Finch as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. The White House even assembled a “Black Cabinet” of informal advisers and, somewhat improbably, recruited former CORE Director Floyd McKissick and other African American activists into administration roles with promises to promote policies framed as “black capitalism” as well.