America's Top Hate Crime Prosecutor Talks Battling Antifa, Anti-Semitism, and the Deep State

Summary

Pod Force One – Episode Summary

Podcast: Pod Force One
Host: Miranda Devine (New York Post columnist)
Guest: Hameet Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, DOJ
Episode Title: America's Top Hate Crime Prosecutor Talks Battling Antifa, Anti-Semitism, and the Deep State
Date: December 10, 2025

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Overview

This episode features a candid and wide-ranging interview with Hameet Dhillon, the newly appointed head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division and the nation's leading hate crime prosecutor. Dhillon and host Miranda Devine discuss her dramatic arrival at DOJ, the sweeping changes under her leadership, the “self-purge” of career staff, battling anti-Semitism and religious hate crimes, resetting priorities away from legacy DEI agendas, and her personal story as an immigrant and conservative legal disruptor. The conversation also explores the "deep state," the weaponization of government, attacks on conservative lawyers and activists, and Dhillon’s motivation to serve at great personal sacrifice.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Turbulent Arrival and DOJ Shake-Up

• Confirmation & Tone-Setting:

  • Dhillon describes a fraught Senate confirmation marked by intense opposition from Democrats and liberal civil rights groups.

    “The knives were already out … I think they might have been surprised at the speed and determination with which we immediately made changes.” (00:46 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Immediate Actions:

  • Sent 50 demands to top universities for compliance on DEI issues and laid out a reorientation memo to all sections, emphasizing rule of law and new priorities dictated by the administration.

    “We’re still going to enforce all these laws, but through a different lens.” (02:11 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Mass Exodus of DOJ Lawyers

  • More than half the Civil Rights Division’s staff quit or accepted buyouts, nearly 70% in total.

    “More than half the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division reacted to these memos by quitting.” (03:25 – Hameet Dhillon)
    “They had crying sessions together … unhappy hours … a support group outside and a spokesperson who constantly goes on MSNBC and thrashes me.” (04:00 – Hameet Dhillon)

2. Reshaping DOJ’s Mission

• Conservative Shortage in Public Service:

  • Dhillon laments the lack of conservative lawyers serving in government compared to the ideological commitment of their liberal peers, who are supported by institutions.

    “The conservative side has not done a great job of encouraging lawyers to do their tour of duty in the government … we do not have institutions like that … on the right.” (07:37 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Law School and Legal Culture Bias:

  • Conservative law students face difficulties in getting jobs and clerkships due to ideological exclusion from mainstream legal institutions. (08:51 – 10:01)

• Personal Sacrifice and Motivation:

  • She sold her firm, made a substantial financial cut, moved from California to D.C. (“the swamp”), and did so out of a sense of duty and opportunity to effect real change.

    “You get a request like that to come help your country; what are you going to do? See, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” (11:17 – Hameet Dhillon)

3. Weaponization of Government & The Deep State

• Systemic Partisanship and Entrenchment:

  • Dhillon details how the DOJ and federal agencies remained ideologically captured beneath the political appointee level through successive administrations.

    “In all the years ... the Civil Rights Division didn't change at all … lawyers … had been there for their entire 30, 40, even 50 year plus careers.” (15:21 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Critique of Left’s Network:

  • She points to a well-funded, coordinated apparatus (e.g., Arabella Advisors, Soros groups) effectively pushing culture and policy at the state and federal levels, compared to the fragmented conservative efforts. (17:07 – 18:11)

• Biden/Obama White House Dynamics:

  • The current administration is effectively “Obama’s third term,” run by holdover staff and aligned consultants.

    “Almost all the personnel puppeteering the White House were Obama personnel… Susan Rice … Lisa Monaco…” (18:42 – Hameet Dhillon)
    “It was Obama’s third term … now with some personal axes to grind … the Biden family business had to keep running.” (19:11 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Lawfare and Surveillance:

  • Alleges coordinated abuse of prosecutorial power: targeting attorneys for Trump, Project Veritas, and pro-life centers, piercing attorney-client privilege, and use of investigative powers against opponents.

    “We were part of the investigative targets … because we represented the Republican National Committee … and the Trump campaign.” (27:06 – Hameet Dhillon)

4. Civil Liberties, Free Speech, and Censorship

• First Amendment Absolutism:

  • Dhillon’s lifelong passion for First Amendment – from student journalism to representing censored conservatives.

    “The First Amendment is sacred to me... that’s why I went to law school.” (21:36 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Censorship Collaborations:

  • Details how government-adjacent groups, “pseudo-nonprofits,” and political actors used big tech platforms to throttle conservative speech — a phenomenon slowed only by changes in Twitter/X ownership.

    “A Democrat consulting firm … paid $25 million to … see who's saying wrong things on the Internet and how can we make them stop.” (31:31 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Wikipedia, AI, and Defamation:

  • The rise of AI “hallucinations,” Wikipedia bias, and the reinforcement of ideological narratives through search, as well as potential (but limited) legal recourse. (32:35 – 35:36)

5. Tackling Hate Crimes & Civil Rights

• Uneven Enforcement and New Direction:

  • Dhillon outlines a major shift: aggressive enforcement of hate crime laws for all Americans, including Jews, Christians, and whites; cases against anti-Semitic agitation, anti-Christian attacks, and pro-faith First Amendment violations.

    “…everybody – white people have rights, men have rights, everybody has rights in this country. Christians.” (37:23 – Hameet Dhillon)
    “In the less than eight months … I think we brought more cases to protect people of faith than entire four-year administrations.” (40:38 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Addressing High-Profile Hate Crimes & Anti-Semitism:

  • Actively pursuing cases involving synagogue blockages, violent attacks on minorities in “blue cities,” firebombing of religious institutions, and relentless civil rights violations by activists. (35:36 – 39:03)

6. Personal Journey & Resilience

• Immigrant Story:
  • Born in India; her father a doctor, her grandfather an Air Force general; emigrated to the US, faced rural Southern racism (KKK signs in her childhood town).

    “There were signs … ‘the grand dragons of the Ku Klux Klan welcome you to Smithfield, North Carolina’ … My parents didn’t know what the Klan was.” (44:26 – 45:56 – Hameet Dhillon)

    • Parents exercised their Second Amendment rights out of prudence.
• Resilience in the Face of Adversity:
  • Early bullying in school, professional setbacks, and her family’s “tough it out” approach gave her the tools and thick skin for legal and political battles. (47:15 – 48:31)

7. Building a Conservative Legal Movement

• Choosing Clients and Starting Her Own Firm:

  • Left the “soulless” world of big law to represent controversial conservatives (e.g., Andy Ngo, James Damore). Established a successful law firm and a nonprofit legal foundation (Center for American Liberty). (53:05 – 58:29)

    “I only took clients and cases that I believed in personally and liked. It was a very blessed way to practice law.” (54:22 – Hameet Dhillon)

• On Being Conservative in Law:

  • Family’s conservative values—both economic and cultural—were formative. Involvement in conservative student media and legal organizations from a young age cemented her perspective. (49:53 – 55:51)

8. Personal Loss and Faith

• Marriage, Loss, and Caregiving:
  • Dhillon recalls her marriage to Saurav (a Democrat-turned-Republican), being his caregiver during illness, and supporting her parents in parallel health crises—underscoring her commitment to family and faith. (59:03 – 66:28)

    “It was a privilege. … Everyone should be so lucky if they're sick to have a loving spouse … that was a beautiful thing.” (64:43 – 66:28 – Hameet Dhillon)

    • Emphasizes the role of faith in resilience and caring for elders.

9. Political State of Play and Concerns about the Future

• Deep Partisanship & The Filibuster’s Future:
  • Warns of the implications if Democrats abolish Senate rules like the filibuster, open the path to Supreme Court-packing, and permanent electoral advantage.

    “There’s no courtesy anymore between the parties. … There’s no comity. The Obama era abolished that.” (70:15 – Hameet Dhillon)

• Urgency, Accountability, and Limits of DOJ:
  • Notes public impatience for prosecutions against “deep state” actors, but underscores DOJ's ethic of caution, evidence, and justice—not show trials.

    “I work at the United States Department of Justice, not the United States Department of Prosecutions.” (73:15 – Hameet Dhillon)

    • On her responsibilities:

    “I'm a prosecutor. I'm the top hate crime prosecutor in the country. And so we look at that every day.” (73:59 – Hameet Dhillon)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the DOJ Exodus:

  “I didn’t fire anybody. I just told them they had to do their job differently. They self-deported, with a nice golden parachute.” (05:55 – Hameet Dhillon)

• On the “Deep State”

  “It was Obama's third term. Yeah. Now with some personal axes to grind ... the Biden family business had to keep running.” (19:11 – Hameet Dhillon)

• On Free Speech:

  “The First Amendment is sacred to me.” (21:36 – Hameet Dhillon) “There's no free speech in Canada. Americans just like that everywhere where English is spoken, speech is free. Not so.” (22:14 – Hameet Dhillon)

• On Hate Crimes Enforcement:

  “Everybody—white people have rights, men have rights, everybody has rights in this country. Christians. … not just some Americans.” (37:23–38:21 – Hameet Dhillon)

• On Caregiving and Loss:

  “It was a privilege. My dad was also terminally ill at the same time ... our families closer together … that's why faith, I think, is very important actually, because it equips you with some longitudinal perspective …” (64:15–66:28 – Hameet Dhillon)

• On DOJ Ethics:

  “I work at the United States Department of Justice, not the United States Department of Prosecutions.” (73:15 – Hameet Dhillon)

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Key Timestamps for Important Topics

• DOJ shake-up, staff exodus: 00:46–05:55
• Shortage of conservative lawyers: 06:59–10:01
• Personal sacrifice for public service: 10:01–12:38
• Weaponization of DOJ & “Obama’s third term”: 13:30–19:33
• Targeting lawyers, Project Veritas, privilege: 20:09–27:23
• On AI/Wikipedia/Tech censorship: 32:35–35:36
• Shift in hate crime enforcement: 35:36–41:56
• Dhillon’s immigrant background & resilience: 41:56–48:31
• Conservative legal movement, Damore/Andy Ngo: 53:05–58:29
• Personal loss, caregiving: 59:03–66:28
• Filibuster and partisan warfare: 69:18–72:08
• Ethos of the DOJ under Dhillon: 72:08–74:23

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Themes and Tone

The discussion is direct, combative, and unvarnished, with both guest and host expressing unapologetic conservative views and a sense of mission. Dhillon is forthright about institutional battles, personal sacrifice, and the challenges of restoring trust and fairness in the DOJ. The tone is often personal, sometimes darkly humorous, and bracingly honest about the stakes in American public life.

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For listeners interested in the intersection of law, politics, civil rights, and institutional reform—especially from a conservative perspective—this episode offers not only backstage views but deeply personal insights into the motivations and convictions driving change at the highest levels of DOJ.

Transcript

[Miranda Devine]

Welcome to the Pod Force One podcast. I'm Miranda Devine. Today we're joined by Hameet Dhillon. She runs the Justice Department's very powerful Civil Rights Division. Hamit Dhilan, thank you so much for joining Pod Force One.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I can't wait for this conversation.

[Miranda Devine]

Now you are leading the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which is a notorious hotbed of leftist activism, social engineering, and it must have been a huge shock to them to have you arrive. You're a conservative, you've represented as a lawyer in private practice, so many high profile conservatives who've been targeted by the left. What was your welcome like?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, you got a clue of what the welcome was going to be like from the Judiciary Committee hearing where basically all the Democrat senators came after me and every Democrat civil rights, every liberal civil rights group in America, America came after me. And so the knives were already out. And I think no one was surprised by what my direction was going to be, but I think they might have been surprised at the speed and determination with which we immediately made changes in the Civil Rights division. So I was confirmed by the Senate in early April. The President had nominated me back in December.

So people had a lot of time to get prepared. And I was warned that there'll be some Easter eggs hidden and like bad Easter eggs hidden in the bowels of the doj, things that the DOJ prior administration might have done immediately before the changeover of power. And it was kind of a vacuum between the President swearing in and the time that inferior officials in the DOJ get confirmed. So a lot of mischief could be done by interim leaders. And so, so what I did was I, you know, you come into the government, it's like any other big business, if you will. You got to do your HR training and in the case of the government, you got to figure out how to handle sensitive documents. A lot of training in the week one, but I fired off 50 letters to America's top 50 institutions of higher learning the end of that first week, demanding their documents and compliance with students for fair admissions and other, you know, DEI issues. We sort of launched that pretty hard. And then the second week, I wrote memos to each of the 11 or 12 sections that I supervise in the Civil Rights division, laying out what the federal laws are that we administer, the venerable federal civil rights laws dating back to the Klan Act, Americans with disabilities act, title 6, title VII, title IX, and so many others. And then I said, we're going to be changing our priorities in each of your sections, and we're going to take the lead from the White House and the President's executive orders. And so we're still going to enforce all of these laws, but through a different lens than what you've been doing. So please put your pencils down, make sure that the work that you're doing is consistent with this direction. And if it isn't, we're going to need to change it. You may recall that at the same time, the DOGE folks working with OMB had offered severance packages to government officials who perhaps wanted to use this opportunity to go do something else with their lives. Case of DOJ folks. They were offered five month packages. Just, you know, for your average lawyer with some tenure there, it's a six figure lump sum.

So more than half the lawyers in the civil Rights division reacted to these memos by quitting.

[Miranda Devine]

Right. And that was what, about 400 of them?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, there were over 400 lawyers, so more than 200 quit. Right. And then since that time, another close to 100 have quit. I mean, it's like not quite 75%, but maybe approaching 70% have quit. And they did it in phases. And I think there was some denial. And you know, they were, they had crying sessions together and they had.

[Miranda Devine]

Because you asked them to obey the law. Yes. And just follow what the democratically elected president's priorities were.

[Hameet Dhillon]

And frankly, that was just, it was shocking to them. They had unhappy hours, you know, things like that. It was like a lot of drama and hand wringing and they have a support group outside and a spokesperson who constantly goes on MSNBC and thrashes me and what we're doing.

[Miranda Devine]

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[Hameet Dhillon]

The truth?

[Miranda Devine]

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[Hameet Dhillon]

I think this is the biggest single personnel self purge in DOJ history. Congratulations. Thank you. I didn't fire anybody. I just told them they had to do their job differently. They self deported, you know, with a nice golden parachute from the government. But. So that's, that's it.

[Miranda Devine]

To be picked up by all the Democrat law firms in D.C. yeah.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Pseudo nonprofits. Nonprofits, activists, whatever. No one should cry for them. They are going to be doing just fine for the most part. A couple people tried to come back after apparently maybe they couldn't get work outside but we immediately know, determined to move on. And so it has posed some challenges with this. Yeah.

[Miranda Devine]

What do you do with you've lost 70% of your workforce.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, it's challenging in two ways. First of all, I did make a commitment which I firmly believe because I have been a longtime civil rights lawyer and enforcing all of these laws, I believe in them. I think they're important and you still have to enforce them. And then secondly, we have this whole ambitious affirmative agenda of the Trump administration that has never been done in a Republican administration before.

Aggressively protecting the rights of people of faith, dismantling the DEI edifice that has taken grown up over decades and you know, some of those excesses and you know, trying to enforce our criminal laws.

Hate crime laws that, that impact all Americans, not just some Americans. So it's an ambitious agenda. So there was a struggle to get the paperwork done to finally start hiring people. But we have gotten that logjam broken. Now we're in the hiring mode and now we have a little bit of a supply problem because the conservative side has not done a great job of encouraging lawyers to be the Peace Corps for liberty, if you will, or to do their tour of duty in the government. People go straight from being members of the federalist society in law schools, to engaging in ponderous debates on arcane theory, to making a lot of money in big corporate law firms that don't do any Good. To advance the liberty interests that we're talking about here. And I confronted this early in my career, but eventually made my own way and created my own civil rights organization and a firm that does all this good work. But that has been a bit of an evangelical challenge. So every time I go out and I speak to a group of leaders, lawyers, I give them a little lecture about how it's kind of their duty to give back. And on the left, they do that. But the difference is all the big law firms I'm talking about, they're captured by the left. And so they will happily grant 100 or 1,000 hours to a lawyer to go do a death penalty case on some technical foul that may have occurred or pro abortion work. We do not have institutions like that, large institutions like that on the right. And so that's been a challenge.

[Miranda Devine]

And also, I guess the law schools are all captured by the left as well. So it's very hard. I know. I've spoken to conservative law students who, you know, find it difficult to get jobs and clerkships and all sorts of the sort of apparatus that the left has around its mentoring of young lawyers.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I mean, getting a clerkship you can do because you do that through the Federalist Society network and pipeline. But getting a job after that, after openly being a conservative in one of these big law firms, people erase conservative groups from their resumes. They're not creative in thinking about these opportunities. If you're prioritizing money over values, then it's pretty easy choice to go where the money is. But ultimately I did that for about 10 years. There weren't choices at the beginning of my career. I've been a lawyer for over three decades. There were no choices. Conservative institutions or conservative law firms. You couldn't get a job doing that. And so I just found it very soulless to go to work every day and feel, not feel good about what I did all day long. And so I created it myself. But not everyone is entrepreneurial, so.

[Miranda Devine]

And you've made quite big sacrifice because you've had to sell, I think, your private law firm that you built up and was so successful to come into public service, take, I presume, an enormous pay cut and then move from your beautiful house in San Francisco with a big garden and et cetera to the dreaded swamp.

[Hameet Dhillon]

The swamp, yeah.

[Miranda Devine]

Why did you do all that?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, so I have lived in idyllic, Wacky California for 25 years before I came here to D.C. and actually, when I did one tour of duty in D.C. between college and Law school, I determined to never live in D.C. again. And so here I am. But there's a couple of things. First of all, over the last few years, I did represent President Trump and my law firm represented President Trump's campaign. One of my partners is the White House counsel, David Warrington, and another partner's deputy White House counsel. They're both in the West Wing.

The President called me with AG Bondi and Elon Musk one day in November after the election, and you get a call from the three of them sitting around the pool at Mar a Lago, and it's just out of the blue. Out of the blue.

[Miranda Devine]

Wow.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I didn't recognize the number other than it was Florida.

[Miranda Devine]

And where were you then?

[Hameet Dhillon]

I was at my home in, in San Francisco and cooking something, you know, gardening, knitting. You know, my husband had passed away like, three months earlier, and so I was kind of, you know, kind of trying to figure out my next purpose in life. I was proud to have just come home from Arizona, where the campaign had put me in charge of running the election in Arizona, which was successful for that effort. And, you know, you. You get a request like that to come help your country, what are you going to do? Yeah, see, it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And so, yeah, I had home in Sonoma also. Right on. Right close to the ocean. You can see whales from there. You can't see whales from my house in D.C. and Capitol Hill. But it is a sacrifice. It's a sacrifice for every single person who does it. It's not pleasant in D.C. it's actually thoroughly unpleasant, quite frankly, because it's such a Democrat town. It's not just Democrat town. It's such a company town. Even the, like, conservative lobbyists or whoever makes their lifestyles over there, you have to get used to a culture of walk into a restaurant, like a steakhouse, and every single person turns around to see somebody important walking, because if they do, then they're going to get up from their table and abandon whoever they were having dinner with and go suck up to whatever senator, Congressman, DOJ official has walked into the room.

[Miranda Devine]

Joe Biden's perfect town.

[Hameet Dhillon]

It is. And, you know, but there's some people who thrive in that. I just find it repulsive. And it is what it is. And so I, I like to say that in San Francisco, for all of its foibles, first of all, very beautiful city and I really enjoyed living there, they treat the federal judge and the barista exactly the same right out. Like, yeah, there's no status issue There, like New York. Yeah, like here, you know. Yeah, it's just this is a very transactional town too, but very transparently transactional as opposed to fake, transact, you know, sort of fake nobility. But. So that's been an interesting anthropological experiment that I will probably write about my memoirs one day. But, yeah, no, I have a nice house in D.C. and, you know, it's just trying to live. I've got a garden. I brought my dahlias from San Francisco. I planted them at my house in D.C. and trying to have some mental space and continuity.

[Miranda Devine]

Now, the Biden administration, you, you now have got some insight into what they were up to. It seems to me like a very malign and orchestrated.

Weaponization of all aspects of the federal government, particularly the Department of Justice against conservative Trump supporters. We had, you know, parents at school board meetings, targeted by the FBI, traditional Catholics, you know, pro lifers. January 6th, people raided. And it really. And then of course, Donald Trump himself. But it just seemed almost like a nightmare now you look back at it, but it was so normalized at the time. Do you know who was orchestrating it and how involved was Joe Biden? Because I don't buy that he was checked out the entire four years. I know that he has cognitive issues, but they waxed and waned. And I think he was maliciously focused on Trump and his supporters personally and protecting his own family's corruption, of course.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, let's talk about it mechanically and then the substance of it. So here's my political take on it. Just from my prior work before joining the doj, which is the left apparatus of Obama, which was well entrenched in, in those eight years, did not expect.

Trump to win. I don't think most conservatives expected Trump to win, so he probably didn't. I won't say that he was very confident and a great leader, but I will tell you that I was, I was a new member of the Republican National Committee. I mean, quite a few of those people didn't expect the President to win.

And he did, and he beat the odds. And they just were clearly not tapped into the American people. So there was an immediate shock to the system. Now, in all the years, let's just take the civil rights division, in all the years that there have been changeovers of power between the parties, the civil rights division didn't change at all. The personnel didn't change. There were literally lawyers that had been there for their entire 30, 40, even 50 year plus careers. They didn't change. The Republicans appointed for those positions didn't force change the way I did. And I'm not blaming anybody for that. It's like, if you're going to be part of the D.C. culture, you got to play nice with people. I get it. But nobody had that vision of like, we're going to brutally change this place to how it should be and we're going to change it for the permanently. And.

[Miranda Devine]

And so that's why Republicans never really achieved any change.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah, I mean it, you can't be Mr. Nice Guy. You have to break eggs to make an omelet. And I just know that as a manager, CEO of two different organizations I created, it's like you can be popular or you can be effective. You can be both at the same time for the most part. So. So anyway, that's like the mechanical thing. And then they thought they had defeated Trump the second time. When the lawfare succeeded, it did succeed. And it's part of that was Covid. Part of that was a persistent failure by the conservative apparatus to make enforcement of election laws at the state level a priority or also to even bother to run and rule at the state level. I think there's a lot of this whining that why aren't you fixing things in D.C. why don't you just go fix things with the stroke of a pen? Well, we have a political system that the founders sat down and most of that work needs to be done in the states and it's hard and you have to raise money and you have to do all of those things. So that happened.

[Miranda Devine]

And is that for election integrity in the state level?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Just for one. And you look at the gender issues, all the issues that people want to fix in D.C. could and should have been fixed or stopped at the state level. But that requires organization, work, dedication, fundraising, a non grifty culture of that. And I think the left will just manage that much better. I mean, they have Arabella advisors and these other, you know, Soros groups, Tides Foundation, Ford Foundation. They're very effective at deploying the money to nonprofits, or as I call them, pseudo nonprofits that are really weaponizing. So, so then you come back to what happened. So none of the personnel changed between really below the Senate confirmed level and the doj. There wasn't a lot of change over there. There's also this culture in the Department of Justice and all the U.S. attorney's offices that somehow the DOJ lawyers are better than other lawyers. Like they are some class or cut above and they're like more noble and they have some principles and nobody else does Right. That ain't true. Let me tell you right now, we are all lawyers who have ethical obligations and no one's better than anybody else. I think criminal defense lawyers play an extremely important role in our functioning system of government. The founders did too. So I have great respect for the lawyers on the opposite side typically. And I think that just didn't exist in the doj, frankly. And that arrogance has translated into and help weaponize the lawfare. Now, you asked about Biden. I don't, I have never met him personally. Don't know his cognitive state. But I do think it's the case that almost all the personnel puppeteering the White House were Obama personnel.

[Miranda Devine]

Right.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Susan Rice and all these other people and all these consultants. Lisa Monaco. When I go do my weekly meetings with people in the DOJ and I'm waiting for my, for my appointment, I look up in the pictures of all the portraits. They're all the, you know, recent ones are all the same bad guys sometimes twice because they were in the first they were in Obama and then they were in the Biden administration. It's just like moved up to different places. And so you have these photographs of all the prior leaders. So it's kind of interesting, but.

[Miranda Devine]

So it's Obama's third term, in a way.

[Hameet Dhillon]

It was Obama's third term. Yeah. Now with some personal access to grind, mind you, you know, family peccadillo of Biden family, or quite of a different order of magnitude. I mean, President Obama's kids weren't up to anything nefarious in the.

Oligarch sphere, unlike Biden's family clearly was. So the Biden family business had to keep running. That definitely occurred. And so I think there's almost certainly, I know there was interference between legitimate efforts to go after and investigate Biden family, because I know that from my private practice. I represented journalistic organizations including at the time Project Veritas, which was being prosecuted or investigated for the publishing the Ashley Biden or acquiring the Ashley Biden diary. Not publishing. No.

[Miranda Devine]

Tell us about that.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, there's some aspects of that case that are still ongoing, but Southern District of New York was filled with prosecutors who worked hand in hand with the Biden family's private lawyers to obtain warrants to investigate, to try to keep all of that secret, to pierce the attorney client privilege, to pierce the First Amendment privileges that are in the common law in our system and to really abuse the system. Typically, the Department of Justice does have some rules and regulations that are quite good. When you go after a state or when you go after a journalist or when you go after public corruption, and when you go after a lawyer's communications with their client, there are certain additional layers of protection that are meant to be in place. You look at the rules around the FISA court that are meant to be in place. Very high level officials are supposed to sign off on these things. So we saw in the witch hunts against President Trump, high level DOJ officials, including some that, you know, he may have appointed, just rubber stamping the most outrageous transgressions of ethics, facts and good policy on a daily basis. And it's just truly shocking. Disgusted me for my profession, some of.

[Miranda Devine]

The things I've seen unconstitutionally protected.

[Hameet Dhillon]

The First Amendment is sacred to me. I mean, literally. I went to law school because I was a college journalist and I saw what happened to my colleagues in college. I was on 60 Minutes complaining about attacks on college journalists in the 1980s. And so that, like, that's why I went to law school, because it's so sacred to me and it is so unique in America. Yes. You don't have it in the uk. Yes. You don't have it anywhere else in the world.

[Miranda Devine]

I think it's why America is the freest place place still. I mean, even with all these assaults.

[Hameet Dhillon]

That's right.

[Miranda Devine]

First Amendment and the Second Amendment. And I've lived a lot of my time in Australia and worked somewhat in London in England, and it's not the same.

[Hameet Dhillon]

There's no free speech in Canada. I mean, Americans just like that everywhere where English is spoken, speech is free. Not so.

[Miranda Devine]

But you can trash it here.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I mean, it's, you can trash it here. In fact, I, I just this morning, someone who I respect texted me a fairly heinous thing that's being posted near a college campus and said, look at this, this is horrible. I'm like, it is horrible. And it's also protected by the First Amendment. So we do have to make a lot of hard judgment calls in that regard.

Last year, Instagram launched Teen Accounts, which default all teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. And we'll continue adding new safeguards for teens to help give parents peace of mind. Explore Teen accounts, automatic protections and all of our ongoing [e-mail] Teenaccounts.

[Miranda Devine]

Ashley Biden was the daughter of Joe, but. Or is the daughter? Is the daughter.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah.

[Miranda Devine]

And she had been in drug rehab and left behind a private diary with, you know, some things that people weaponized, I think against her unfairly. But one of Them was she felt that, you know, she said, maybe I had inappropriate showers with my dad. Now, I think people have made more of that than they should because this was a private exploration of her childhood. But that made it newsworthy. And so it was sold by somebody to Project Veritas, which is this sort of guerrilla media outfit. And they chose not to publish it. And yet they were raided at dawn and paraded, arrested. And the New York Times was tipped off at the same time.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah, look, I'm not going to adopt all of those facts. And it was an attorney client relationship for me. And I know a lot about the book backstory, but I think what's publicly known in court filings is our efforts. And they were like, I think four different law firms working on this for the Project Veritas side. There was a criminal firm and there was my firm and there was a defamation related practice, and then another firm that was giving regular journalism First Amendment advice on state law issues to the organization. So all of us working together as a team, attack this from different angles. And, you know, we won some and ultimately we lost some. And I just, I just found it shocking that lawyers in America thought it was okay to. It's. There's a United States Supreme Court ruling on the issue. It's called Bartnicki vs. Vopper. On the extent to which a journalistic organization can be held liable for how some piece of very important information like the Pentagon Papers came to their attention. This is a lot of protections for journalists. Some, some you may disagree with because of, you know, there's, there's harm in the margins.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah.

[Hameet Dhillon]

But ultimately that's the call made by the United States Supreme Court. And so.

[Miranda Devine]

And they didn't even publish it. That's.

[Hameet Dhillon]

They did publish it.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah.

[Hameet Dhillon]

And someone else apparently got their hands on it and published part of it or what have you online. Yeah. And, you know, I, you know, because it's somebody's diary who wants their diary published.

[Miranda Devine]

Exactly.

[Hameet Dhillon]

You know, that's, that's.

[Miranda Devine]

I blame them being upset, but it's a pretty heavy handed use of the Department of Justice.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, it's outrageous. It's outrageous to investigate.

Lawyers and their communications and say that there's no privilege because the, the, they teach you this in law school. You have to think about from a jurisprudence perspective, what if the tables were turned, you know, so they tell you to think about this from the veil of ignorance. And what would you. How would you feel about this if the parties were flipped or the facts were flipped? So the piercing of privilege is Hugely problematic. And that's another sacred thing in our culture that is almost never an excuse.

[Miranda Devine]

To pierce legal privilege.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Correct. There's almost never an excuse to pierce a lawyer's privilege. And yet we've seen this Department of Justice and the prior hands go after. Many lawyers go after their communications with their clients. And my law firm represented the former president and his campaign. And my law firm's name, the Dylan Law Group, is repeatedly mentioned in the Arctic Frost disclosures as a target of these communications. We represented the Republican National Committee.

[Miranda Devine]

They spied on you?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yes, according to Arctic Frost. So we're going to get to the bottom of that at some. Not me, because.

[Miranda Devine]

So they had, like, a warrant for your.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Let's just say that we were part of the investigative targets. And that's because we represented the Republican National Committee. Wow. And we represented the Trump campaign, and we represented some of the other MAGA entities. And so, I mean, we're all over the place there, as are several other law firms of current DOJ officials.

[Miranda Devine]

Well, Rudy Giuliani, who was then the president's lawyer, he was spied on by the Department of Justice. The FBI had a warrant out on his communications. And he didn't know, of course, because you don't get told until well afterwards. And they had some sort of bogus Farah investigation into him. He was never charged.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Right.

[Miranda Devine]

Bob Costello, who was his lawyer and also Steve Bannon's lawyer, same thing. He's. He's spied on.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah. This is a gross abuse of power. And before, not to my knowledge, I have never heard of this. And today I haven't gotten any official name notification. Right. It takes a couple of years. And neither have some. Neither have the other lawyers involved in the Veritas case. I mean, no one's been told that this happened. We just, you. If your phone starts acting funny and things like that, you just assume it. And so it's just kind of very chilling that you have that. But anyway, yes, this was. This was the culture. And then you. Again, I'm not going to comment on ongoing investigations, but it's been publicly noted that there were documents concealed in burn bags. And they were documents at the FBI. At the FBI. And, you know, there's an. And you have James Comey using a alias email to communicate and, you know, giving himself a title of a philosopher to do that. And it's just kind of insane type of arrogance that we've seen.

[Miranda Devine]

Can any of this be. I know there are attempts now to create a, quote, kind of conspiracy case against everybody. Going back from Russia gate right through to, you know, 2024 election. But is there any, do you, how do you feel like in your heart as a lawyer for a long time, do you think any of these people will be held accountable? The, the Jim Comey's, the John Brennan's, you know, the Adam Schiffs, the Lisa Monaco's, right up to the Obamas and the Hillary Clintons.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah, I'm going to take a pass on that. Maybe, you know, these are civil rights violations that allegedly occurred against the targets. And so I'll just leave it at that. I'm, you know, actively engaged in the work that I do at the doj and I do believe that when you have the First Amendment implicated, when you have, we have conspiracy statutes under the Klan act and other statutes that involve conspiracies against rights and they can involve government actors and they can involve conspiring with non government actors to violate the civil rights of an American citizen. Lawyers are citizens and elected officials are citizens.

[Miranda Devine]

So non government actors like people like Norm Ison, the color revolution.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Color revolution. And some of the architects of many of the civil rights violations we've seen in our country over the last many years were not necessarily government officials. Government officials may have worked to carry them out. And I, I'll give you, I'll give you an example of one from my private practice before I joined the DOJ is the massive censorship of online popular accounts, conservative accounts on, on Twitter now known as X. I represented a lawyer, Rogan o', Hanley, named nickname handle DC Drano, very popular account in social media and he was removed from X for a period of years and Twitter, I should say, not X. And we followed the thread and it turns out that through document requests that national association of Secretaries of State, a voluntary organization, was working hand in hand with Democrat secretaries of state, including California's and so called nonprofits like Stanford Observatory and other projects on America's campuses. We're getting probably USAID and God knows what other federal funding to do it.

And a Democrat consulting firm.

Hired by the California Secretary of State. SKD Knickerbocker was the name of this outfit and they're paid $25 million to.

[Miranda Devine]

Analyze by the association of Secretary of.

[Hameet Dhillon]

State, by the state of California, by my tax dollars, which I paid a lot in those 25 years in California.

Who's saying wrong things on the Internet and how can we make them stop?

[Miranda Devine]

So what were they upset? It was this Covid related, Covid mandate.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Election related between Covid related to any bad Any wrong thing? Who knows, maybe environmental related. I mean.

If Elon Musk hadn't bought yeah, Twitter, it would still be going on there now. There's been an apology tour of Mark Zuckerberg and others. When the power shifted again, President Trump became 47. Suddenly mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa will never happen again.

But you know.

There'S still a lot of this stuff happening at some point.

[Miranda Devine]

What about Wikipedia for instance?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Oh, Wikipedia is just, it's a gross offender. And I just saw a quote from their founder yesterday saying that Wikipedia should publish the names of its volunteer editors so we can all see who's doing the defamation. Because every conservative prominent person with an account of Wikipedia, myself included, has some gross smears and distortions on there. Absolute trash to totally comes back at you in a Senate confirmation hearing as if it's fact. Oh wow, it's insane. And then you add there's a whole new thing happening, which is, which is AI trolling the Internet, using Wikipedia as a source and then hallucinating defamation about people. My old law firm has a case that they took on after I left involving Robby Starbuck, the Tennessee activist.

Search results in Google were just saying.

Really offensive things about him that are completely divorced from reality. And it's going to happen to a lot of people. I just saw several different conservative accounts say I'm not dead. I have not on my deathbed. This is all AI generated garbage.

[Miranda Devine]

But it always AI generated goes in one direction.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Correct.

[Miranda Devine]

Their training materials are Wikipedia, etc.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yes, and there are these large language models are, you know, based on trash. And I did a little computer programming in the 1980s and I learned garbage in, garbage out. And that is exactly what's happening with a lot of this stuff. And so scary.

[Miranda Devine]

Anything be done with Wikipedia? I mean they are supposedly an ngo, a non profit, and yet they, they're supposed to be unbiased and yet they're incredibly biased.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I think private parties could take them on for defamation. Certainly you have to.

[Miranda Devine]

Is there anything that the Civil Rights Division can get involved in?

[Hameet Dhillon]

I can't really comment on that. I'll give that some thought. But generally speaking, we don't go after private institutions. We may do that if they're found to have been in conspiracy with some statute, under some statute that we protect. But generally speaking, we go after state governments. Actually the main target of the Civil Rights Division is in our conspiracy type work is and some other statutes is state actors. So for example, we go after bad cops who violate the Civil rights of Americans. When we're doing employment work, we go after state employers who are violating.

DEI rules. For example, the perpetuation of race based discrimination and hiring in a state entity is illegal under federal law. And so we would go after those, but for the most part, private plaintiffs, like, for what I did for all the years before I came to the Civil Rights Division was use state and federal statutes to go after private parties like that. And so I think there isn't a role for the government to fix everything, unfortunately. Yeah.

[Miranda Devine]

And I mean, you've also gotten involved in some crimes, really horrific crimes in blue cities where citizens have been let down by defund the police and all sorts of kind of DEI practices. And one of them was Irina Zarutska, who was the poor Ukrainian girl refugee who was sitting on a train and had a throat slashed by a repeat felon. Career criminal, psychopath alleged. And then just more recently, there was another poor young woman in Chicago again sitting on public transportation. And a similar.

Repeat felon comes up and sets her alight, pours her gasoline on her and sets her alight. We're seeing more and more of these atrocious crimes occurring in blue cities. Is there any involvement that you have or can have?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, there is involvement, but I can't really talk about our pending investigations. What I can say is that we have federal civil rights statutes that make it illegal for someone to do something. Now, these are controversial, but a hate crime. Now what is a hate crime? It isn't hate speech that's protected by the First Amendment. It is a crime motivated by an illegal protected characteristic. So that would include someone's race. That would include sexual orientation under the Matthew Shepard act, that would include sex as well under some statutes or disability where there's a crime that's motivated, for example, by the person's religion or their race. And it used to be just minority race, but we interpret it under numerous recent federal civil rights rulings by the United States Supreme Court. Is everybody white people have rights, Men have rights. Everybody has rights in this country. Christians. We brought numerous cases protecting Christians from attacks, firebombing and plots to firebomb American churches, American synagogues. There's a Holocaust survivor who was murdered in Colorado because they were participating in a peaceful walk rally to remember the hostages in Israel before they were freed. So these are all federal civil rights investigations we're doing. I mean, I've publicly announced that we're looking at the Park East Synagogue blockage here in New York. Just recently we did a civil rights case, a Few weeks ago under the Face act in West Orange, New Jersey where a gang of anti Zionists blocked access to a synagogue and disrupted a religious service there.

[Miranda Devine]

So we saw it when you said the park east, this is the Upper east side of Manhattan where people trying to go Jews trying to go Osha synagogue were blocked aggressively by a group physically blocked, anti Zionist. But my question is that during the Biden administration we had people, and previously we had, you know, pro life Christians praying outside abortion clinics silently by themselves, not blocking anyone who went to jail.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yes.

[Miranda Devine]

How can that happen? And then these people who are blocking the synagogues get away scot free.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, they're not getting away scot free, aren't they? No.

[Miranda Devine]

Good.

[Hameet Dhillon]

They're not going to get away scot free. We have active hand in hand investigation with the Southern District of New York to exactly what happened there. The example I gave in West Orange is a recent example. And we have asked people from all sides walks of life. There were definitely dozens if not hundreds of instances of crisis pregnancy centers being blocked in the last administration where the DOJ firebombed, blocked, attacked, et cetera. And the DOJ did nothing about it. They did something about it. In one case which I really recently just won a ruling just two days ago in the 11th Circuit where what they I think try to show being even handed, they did many cases involving persecuting peaceful pro life protesters, all of whom the president pardoned, by the way. They were convicted. The president pardoned them. But in the case of there was a group called Jane's Revenge. Yes, Jane's Revenge, the terrorist group is. You said the word, not me. Blocked access to multiple and threatened and made violent threats against multiple crisis pregnancy centers. Pro life centers in Florida. Florida. In different districts in Florida there was a prosecution under the Biden DOJ for conspiracy and for violations of the Face Act. And the single defendant who went to trial in those cases, she lost. And I argued that case in the eight in the 11th Circuit two months ago and we just got a positive ruling in our favor saying that it's a violation of the Klan act conspiracy statute to conspire to attack those crisis pregnancy centers. That's a great pro life center. That's a great use of that law. The case I mentioned in New Jersey involving the synagogue is the first case in over 30 years of the statute being around of the DOJ prosecuting a blockage of a house of worship, any house of worship. So you look at what happened here in Manhattan recently, it's right next to a Jewish School as well. So children were terrorized and threatened by this. And the goal of these folks to me seems clear to make people feel danger and risk at exercising their First Amendment right to go to temple, to go to church. This is completely un American. And in the less than eight months that we've been in office here in the Civil Rights division, I think we brought more cases to, to protect people of faith that entire four year and even eight year administrations and other Republican and Democrat administrations. So the commitment to protect people of faith is really important. And it's something important to me in my own faith, the Sikh faith, we've seen people die in terrorist attacks on houses of worship here in the United States. It's un American and we're not going to put up with it in this doj.

[Miranda Devine]

That's a good segue to talk about you and your background. You were born in India and your father was a doctor and I think you're the, your grandfather was a four star general in the army.

[Hameet Dhillon]

In the Air Force. In the Air Force, yes.

[Miranda Devine]

And then you came here. So tell us about what that was like for your family and your youth. And did you suffer any discrimination growing up or were you just forging ahead?

[Hameet Dhillon]

I didn't even learn how hard it was for my dad to leave his homeland and my mom to of course different challenges in their 20s. Until I had to write my dad's obituary. He died in September last year. My mother, my mother had meticulously kept every single document. I mean, and so I was going through them to see the number of letters that he sent and how he had to start his medical residency in orthopedics again and again and again. First they went to the UK at the time, Indira Gandhi was a Prime Minister of India and she didn't want the smart people to leave. She wanted them to stay there and suffer under their socialism. India was a Soviet client state at the time, so they wouldn't, they wouldn't give doctors discharge certificates to leave the country. So it was really hard. They had to really go through a number of machinations to do that. And first they were able to go to the UK where my brother was born. And I was a small child, 6 months old when I left India and my brother was born there. They didn't like the UK either and socialized medicine. My dad didn't want to practice that way. So there was an opportunity during the Vietnam War where there was a real shortage of physicians here, where, you know, United States was asking foreign medical graduates with good training to come and do their medical training here and be part of that. So my dad moved to New York. I started American school here in the Bronx and my dad did his medical residency, finished it as a chief resident at Albert Einstein Medical College in the Bronx, which is part of Yeshiva University. And so it was very interesting for me. I grew up surrounded by people in an Orthodox Jewish community. I went to an Orthodox Jewish preschool. And I was just telling this group yesterday because you just won an award. I won an award from a. From a. From a Jewish educational nonprofit yesterday for our civil rights work at the doj. And I was telling them when I was growing up, my dad wore a turban until the day he died because he was sick. He was a Sikh.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah.

[Hameet Dhillon]

And my brother wears a turban. And I thought everyone's dad wore something on their head and had a beard. And then it was only when I moved to rural North Carolina where my dad started his practice. People wore things on their head too, but they were white hoods. Over there in the south in the 1920s, 70s, there still was vestiges of the clan. I mean, literally when my dad wanted to raise his. Did not want to raise his family in the New York environment, he wanted to raise his family in a rural, wholesome environment. And one of his medical school classmates had set up his medical practice serving this rural farming community where, you know, your average American doctor wasn't dying to go work in rural North Carolina. So we moved there. How old were you then? I was six years old and I think started my second grade there at six years old. And it was quite a culture shock. There were signs on the highway that Into Smithfield, North Carolina, population 7,000, which was the county seat, so the biggest town in the county saying that the grand dragons of the Ku Klux Klan welcome you to Smithfield, North Carolina. It was right next to the First Method Methodist Church sign and the Baptist church sign. Those are the two other religious institutions. Welcome to North Carolina. Welcome to Smithfield. The Lions, the Rotaries and the clan like it was all normal back then. Now that sign did go away after a year and my parents didn't know what the Klan was.

[Miranda Devine]

This was going to ask you, did.

[Hameet Dhillon]

You even know idea what the Klan was? We had a. We had a neighbor who my, you know, my brother wouldn't lend him a soccer ball or mom said they couldn't play. And he said I'm going to call the Klan on. You know, that did happen and. Right. My parents took the potential threat of lingering racism there seriously. They Exercise our second amendment rights. And mom and dad both took shooting lessons and had. We had firearms in our house in case, but we never had a physical threat.

[Miranda Devine]

But that was the threat they felt.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I think they were just being prudent to protect their families. I do that in D.C. now. I have a concealed carry permit there and I'm glad to have that right. And we also enforce the second amendment in the civil rights division. But look, it wasn't the easiest thing to have a funny name and my long braids and different hairstyle and my mom still sewed all my clothes because that was her convent school upbringing in India. So my clothes were kind of homemade and weird. And you know, I think every kid goes through some level of bullying. It's just different depending on who you are. So I don't consider myself a victim of that or anything, but makes you stronger. Yeah, I think so, yeah. I mean there's bullying as adults, there's bullying in the workplace. I was in Dare say I experienced bullying sometimes from my colleagues today, but you know, not for long.

[Miranda Devine]

But you, you're actually resilient to it because you've experienced it at a young age and thrived.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I think so. I mean it equips you with a lot of tools for politics. It equips you. You like don't read the comments. You know, that kind of a thing where you have to just tough it through and get past it and that these are skills that are necessary in business and succeeding. I was a CEO of both a non profit and a multi state law firm before I took this job. And so it does equip you with a lot of skills that sheltered helicopter parent kids, snowflakes they don't have.

[Miranda Devine]

Talking to people like J.D. vance, in fact. And this way I feel myself is you worry that your own children are not, you know, so pampered or protected. Not pampered, but protected that they haven't suffered much adversity and therefore don't get to develop that resilience.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I mean, when you look, yeah, it's for us, we again, my dad, even in Smithfield, we lived outside the county limits. We lived in a bunch of tobacco fields and soybean fields and entertainment was okay, go out and play, find some frogs in the creek or maybe in the middle of the night, you know, push a cow over or something silly like that. Those are the kind of entertainment before the Internet.

[Miranda Devine]

Awesome.

[Hameet Dhillon]

It's a little different today. So. Yeah. What do you think makes the perfect snack?

[Miranda Devine]

Hmm.

[Hameet Dhillon]

It's gotta be when I'm really craving it and it's convenient. Could it be more specific when it's cravenient? Okay, like a freshly baked cookie made with real butter available right down the street at am, pm or a savory breakfast sandwich I can grab in just a second at am. I'm seeing a pattern here. Well yeah, we're talking about what I crave which is anything from am, pm. What more could you want? Stop by AMPM where the snacks and drinks are perfectly craveable and convenient. That's cravenience am, pm too much. Good stuff.

[Miranda Devine]

You went on to be very successful in law. You mentioned that you had a few years in the corporate high paid corporate world but then you, you went into private practice and you started your own successful law firm and you represented a whole lot of, I guess people that others wouldn't represent or conservatives who didn't get a lot of love from lawyers. People like Andy Ngo who was attacked by antifa other high profile conservatives. So how did, how did you become conservative? Or were you always conservative because of your upbringing? I mean you went to law school, you were living in California.

Why did that not turn you into a mad lefty?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well first of all, I did come from a very conservative family. Conservative politically and conservative culturally.

[Miranda Devine]

But that doesn't protect you normally.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well, it started in childhood. We prayed together every day, we went to the temple together. My parents taught me values, American values. And I, I was just, I think very patriotic as a kid. I mean my parents didn't support Jimmy Carter. I remember getting spanked as a I think second year old for starting a fight in the lunch line and elementary school over, over the election. Really 1976. So that's how far back in second grade? Yeah, second grade. And I got smacked.

[Miranda Devine]

Whose side were you on?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Well I was, I was on the side of Gerald Ford, you know, so I got smacked by Mike Harder supporting second grade teachers. She had like big beehive hair. Do I remember that? Yeah, so. So having the wrong politics, that never happened again. My mom marched down to the school and set them straight about who applies the corporal punishment. And it's not the school, it should be the parents. Excellent, excellent. Anyway, that was a political lesson. It was a political lesson but we also, when Carter became the president we would talk about the stagflation and getting gas every other day. Based on your license plate number. Yeah, and 90% marginal capital gains tax. I'm not sure how many kids hear about that from their disgruntled dad who's paying a lot of tax is what I heard about marginal capital gains tax and all of that around the dinner table. And, and so that really, those lessons. And my mom stayed. I was a stay at home mom while the kids were young. And then she went on to help my dad build his very successful medical practice. So, you know, the cultural and economic conservatism was very deeply ingrained in me. So I was 16 when I went to Dartmouth and, you know, had those values. And I naturally fell in with the conservative newspaper crowd there. And my mentors and friends included Dinesh d', Souza, Laura Ingram, and, you know, a lot of colleagues who have gone on to prominence in journalism at the Wall Street Journal and others. And, and I was a journalist for one year after college, that one year before I went to law school. I was the assistant editor of the Heritage Foundation's magazine, Policy Review.

[Miranda Devine]

Heritage Foundation.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Heritage Foundation's got some challenges with its image these days. But it was at, at that time, you know, I was a huge fan of Jack Kemp in college and you know, he was just like that whole brain trust of the Reagan administration came from all those economists there. And it was just a different place then. Every institution matures. But anyway, when I left that job and went to law school.

Tucker Carlson took that job. So he literally had the exact same job as me, sat at my desk at the Heritage, at the Heritage Foundation. He calls it a fact checker job. I don't know what he did, but I wrote articles, so. But anyway, so I was journalist. And first of all, the pay was crazy low. It was insanely low. It's actually embarrassing.

[Miranda Devine]

And it's journalism, journalism.

[Hameet Dhillon]

But then you had to pretend to be objective too. And that was not sitting with me. I really wanted to be kind of taking sides, and that's what I've done for most of my life now. So that's kind of how I evolved into the conservative lawyer. Now, I started my career here in New York after clerking for a federal judge, and the judge was a conservative appointee. And I was the president of the Federalist Society, the largest chapter in the country. And so I had a lot of great professors at uva Law School and a great legal education there at uva.

But the only career path open to you as a high achieving top 10 law school, federal appeals court clerkship, law review person was to go join one of these white shoe law firms here in wherever, New York, Washington. So I started my career here in New York on the upper. I lived in the Upper east side. I was at a big law firm here. I got Some great training and education there. That firm sent me to London for almost a year. I practiced law in London for a year, got my solicitors qualifying exam. That was fun. And then I moved during the dot com boom to Silicon Valley. That's what took me out to California and the gold rush, chasing the E commerce and all this stuff that was happening back then.

Very interesting time in our country's history. And then eventually I got disillusioned with that career path and decided that I wanted to do good with my license. I mean, not that lawyers don't do good, but there was very little doing good. 911 happened when I was at one of these big law firms and you know, it was a challenge to be able to actually go out and do litigation on the issues that I cared about because like that wasn't their jam. You know, if I wanted to go help some liberal group or death penalty case, that was kind of their pro bono offering. Well, I feel like it's part of my faith and part of my personality to do pro bono publico, help the public every day if I can. This is like a part of my religion. Consider it tithing in some other faiths that's writing a check. We believe in actually doing good in volunteer work. And so I've always tried to keep a portion of my law career as doing good. And I feel like I achieved the time right before I came into this administration where that was 100%. I only took clients and cases that I believed in personally and liked. And it was a very blessed way to practice law. And I also started a nonprofit several years ago. And what spurred that was I was representing a couple of clients who had issues. One was James Damore. Oh yes, from Google Engineer and who.

[Miranda Devine]

Wrote a document saying that the reason there are fewer female engineers at Google is simply because women aren't interested, I think in. In the same sorts of things.

[Hameet Dhillon]

I think basically I would just say the basic premise was men and women are different.

[Miranda Devine]

Yeah.

[Hameet Dhillon]

And you know, he was your typical engineer.

High achieving guy, dropped out of Harvard, PhD program in mathematics of computer science to do this job, like really, really smart guy.

[Miranda Devine]

He's just trying to explain that it wasn't.

[Hameet Dhillon]

He had a thesis.

[Miranda Devine]

Discrimination.

[Hameet Dhillon]

He had a thesis. And it was much more complicated than that. It was lengthy and it was added on to after conversations with many people and it was weaponized against him and. And he suddenly was unemployed by Google. And so I litigated that case.

[Miranda Devine]

And what was the outcome?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Can't talk about the outcome.

[Miranda Devine]

You came to a Deal.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Let's just say that we came to a deal after Google lost an early motion. Every lawyer knows what that means. So anyway, the case was allowed to continue, and then suddenly the case was not happening anymore. I'll just leave it at that. I'm allowed to say that.

[Miranda Devine]

So you're a good lawyer, very successful. I can't think of one that you've lost.

[Hameet Dhillon]

What was your favorite I've lost cases? I lost the Rogan o' Hanley case against Twitter, which we did not prevail on, which I think was wrong. The Supreme Court also whiffed and punted in a very similar case, Missouri versus Morrissey. Started off as Missouri. I feel bitter about both of those cases.

[Miranda Devine]

Which is the biggest free speech case.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yes. Our case was like a companion case. It went up to the Supreme Court around, you know, after that case. And after the court issued the ruling in the Missouri case, the court denied our cert petition. So they kind of looked at it as the same trust.

[Miranda Devine]

But isn't that going back? Isn't that big free speech case, Missouri versus Now it's called Murthy. Isn't that going back?

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah, I mean, I, again, probably can't. I'm not up to date on what's happening in that case. There are still a couple of other cases out there that are companion cases that are before the DOJ now because of parties have switched sides. The government has to defend some of the government officials in those cases. So I won't be.

[Miranda Devine]

But these were Biden officials who were actively censoring Americans, reaching out to.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Even. So when you're switching your personal capacity or your. Your representative capacity, the next government has a choice to make. Do we continue to protect the executive decision making? So that's not something that I'm involved in. The civil division is involved in that case. But I started the nonprofit because there were cases like this where they would have benefited from crowdsourcing.

Foundation funding. And for that, you have to have a nonprofit. So I started the center for American Liberty. I had a highfalutin Latin name for it originally because I was an ancient Greek and Latin major at Dartmouth. But I was quickly persuaded by professional staff to change that to something more accessible. So center for American Liberty has been the name of that nonprofit for. For several years, and it is thriving in my absence, I'm told. And so I had to give up the two nonprofit roles, the two CEO roles, the nonprofit role, and the law firm role, to take my government job.

[Miranda Devine]

And now tell me about your beloved late husband, Sav. Who I never met, but I felt I knew a little through your Twitter feed where you often showed the beautiful meals that you would make for him. He was unwell. But you were married for 11 years. Tell me about him and how you managed to get through his illness and death.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Yeah, we were together for 16 years. I met him when I ran for the State assembly in 2008. And it's kind of a joke when I give talks to young women out there about getting involved in politics. A lot of women are intimidated by it. I tell them that I didn't win the election, but I won the game of life because my husband was then a Democrat. And I had met him because one of my mother was my biggest champion. And when she learned I was running for this really unwinnable seat, it was an open seat where a Democrat had termed out. And so it was an open seat and I was going to run for the state assembly. And I was involved in the San Francisco GOP at the time and we tried to run candidates for every seat. So I stepped up to run and my mom immediately jumped into the fundraising challenge. She's been a big prolific fundraiser and nonprofit organizer, real community organizer in the Sikh community. She basically strong armed every sick doctor in America to write me a check for my campaign. And so she really helped me out a lot. But one of those doctors was married to Saurav's niece. And so when I picked up the check from them, they told me I should contact him because he was on the board of a radio station in San Francisco. So I went and met him and he was on the board of the far left Pacifica Radio stationary at the time. And so he was he far left? No.

[Miranda Devine]

Oh.

[Hameet Dhillon]

But he was a musician. He was a banjo player and he had self taught banjo player. And so he had gotten involved in it for just cultural and artistic reasons. And it was. He had owned a music club in Berkeley. He was kind of anti war protester. He was left for sure. Not far left. Yeah. Turned out to be very conservative socially. Right. Like a lot of old school Democrats. Actually they call themselves Democrats but they don't realize that the party had left them. So anyway, so I met him and I asked if I could he could help me get on the radio. And he said that's never going to happen, but he'd love to take me sailing. And so that was his, that was his line, was very effective line. So. So eventually he came to all my fundraisers and then after I lost the election, we started dating and seeing each Other and.

Moved in together, and then we got married a couple years later. But before he married me, he had to change parties, so it couldn't be an accident.

It came naturally. First he left the Democrat Party, became what's called in California, declined a state. When I ran for state party leadership, I said, no, I can't be married to a Democrat, so you're going to have to.

Change a little more. So he did. And he was. He was actually. In our family, he was the first. He was the early adopter of Trump as a candidate in 2016. Yeah, he. We watched the first debate, and he'd been kind of supportive of another candidate out of pity, and he's like, this is just game over. The only person who's going to win this election is Donald Trump. Really?

[Miranda Devine]

From the first debate.

[Hameet Dhillon]

From the first debate. Wow. Yeah. So not many people, he never let them forget that until, you know, his last month on this earth. But he was quite a bit older than me, and so we had very happy life together. We had home in Sonoma and home in San Francisco, and he was my biggest cheerleader. So every woman should be so blessed to have a man who is so supportive of them. And I just always had that. So I was very lucky. And I wouldn't have the successful law firm and nonprofit without his constant support, wouldn't have run for chair of the Republican National Committee and taken some of those ambitious, some would say quixotic endeavors on without that incredible support from, you know, a man behind me. And so. So I really enjoyed that. But he developed Parkinson's disease during. During the last two years of his life, might have been three years. Wasn't properly diagnosed because, thanks to Covid, people weren't. It wasn't easy for people to get a doctor's appointment. The doctors were scared. So.

Again, the way I was raised, like both my grandparents, my mom's parents, my dad's parents died much younger. My mom's parents lived and were cared for by their two daughters in North Carolina and died in comfortable home settings. Yeah, that's my culture. And so.

When my husband got sick, I was blessed with a lot of law partners and colleagues at my nonprofit and my law firm. And so I was the primary caregiver. And then we had to have some other professional caregivers living with us in the house in the last few months. But that is a challenge. It is a challenge.

[Miranda Devine]

And was it also a beautiful time?

[Hameet Dhillon]

I feel good about playing that role. And I know that.

Had God not brought us together, had we not met his circumstances would have been very different. My circumstances would have been very different. So it was a privilege. My dad was also terminally ill at the same time. He had a pulmonary fibrosis. So mom was going through that. And, you know, it brought our families closer together. There was reconciliation of some family members who weren't talking sometimes, you know, because of these healthcare challenges and.

Everyone should be so lucky if they're sick to have a loving spouse or person in their life. Because the fate of the, you look at what happened here in the state of New York, the fate of the ill in the nursing homes and the quality of care you get in some of these institutions is pitiful. Our health care system is broken. I have a hard time getting medical care as a pretty successful person in D.C. right now. All the private practices are full. So he was.

[Miranda Devine]

Men can't step into what families they can't supposed to do.

[Hameet Dhillon]

And, and, and I, I mean, one of the drawbacks of what you see in American culture in a way, and you see in older cultures what some would say, backward people don't let their elderly or their sick die alone. Yeah, that's just not a thing. Yeah. I don't. Never happened in my family. And so, and that was a beautiful thing. It was.

[Miranda Devine]

People were forced to leave their elderly alone.

[Hameet Dhillon]

It was. And so saying goodbye was difficult. I actually drove my husband to the hospital on the day that he died. And we lived on that famous crooked street in San Francisco and they didn't want to wait for the ambulance to have to come and find a way to park. So I, his caregiver and I put him in the car, we drove to the hospital and didn't make it. So, you know, he was on life support for a day until, until we, you know, said goodbye. So that's a challenge. Then six weeks later, my dad passed away. Oh. So I was able to say goodbye to him. But, you know, these are the challenges in life. And that's why faith, I think, is very important actually, because it equips you with some longitudinal perspective as to what you do when that happens and how to come to grips with it. But it was.

Moving to D.C. pretty soon after that and making my way there. I still have people ask me, have you settled in right? I don't intend to settle in there. I intend to do a kick ass job for the American people and for our president and our Attorney General, and then return to the fields of private practice and doing good in my career somewhere. The law firm has six offices now in Texas and Virginia. And New York, New Jersey, Southern California, Florida. So there are a number of different places I could live. I do love California. It is really hard when you look at the math to justify being a tax resident in California. Now there's talk about wealth taxes here in New York City and California.

[Miranda Devine]

You know Gavin Newsom pretty well and I know we can't really talk about the Prop 15.

Election redrawing, but as a person, do you think he has got any hope to. I mean, he wants to run for president. Do you think he has any hope?

I find him quite repellent, unattractive.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Look.

His staff. The first death threats I got on my job in the Civil Rights division fairly recently were from Gavin Newsom staff laying false charges against me of being involved in the firebombing of judge's house in South Carolina, which turned out to have been an accident. So they blame me and Stephen Miller for that. And you get death threats because of that. You know, I had to literally call the police over some threats that I received. So I kind of have some. That's to declare my conflict of interest here. I don't like his style and his lack of class, but I hope not. I hope that we are able to see through and look at this. This person isn't untested like Obama was in a way where there was this entire fiction created around him. He's been tested, he's been a governor. He's had notable personal foibles and failures as well as state leadership failures. And I think that there are other more promising for the Democrat Party, younger politicians. I think AOC is, I agree, one of those fictionally created in a lab, you know, characters that may be a more promising one for them. I think that's the bigger threat. The zoron mom dummies of the world who are.

Charismatic, attractive, diabolical. That's the next generation. And so. And then you have AI and all this garbage. And whoever controls the AI, I think, is going to control our lives. I mean, I think it's. It's quite scary to think of the extent to which receding control of our lives to machine learning. Because it was scary.

[Miranda Devine]

And just lastly, Mike Davis, I mean, the President is talking about getting the Senate to abolish the filibuster. And I know Mike Davis believes this and I assume President Trump believes this, that if that when the Democrats get in again, which they inevitably will, they will then abolish the filibuster and then stack the supreme court and create two new democratic states with Puerto Rico and D.C. and then it's game over. Do you hold that view?

[Hameet Dhillon]

So I.

That'S kind of a political question. So I would say.

That is one where I can't really comment. I think the administrator will let the president and the White House take their. I can't really speak out of school. So whatever, whatever they decide, I think.

[Miranda Devine]

Cementing his executive orders like the voter registration and so on, various election integrity issues in legislation would presumably safeguard the election.

[Hameet Dhillon]

What I will say is, and this has been said to senators in front of me, is it's very frustrating to have. These aren't laws, they're just rules, courtesy rules from an era where there was courtesy. There's no courtesy anymore between the parties. There's no comedy that the Obama era abolished that. And so when my friends who have stepped up and left their private practice careers and given up their lucrative law firms to become United States attorneys and then they can't get confirmed because of.

[Miranda Devine]

These rules, like Ed Martin, I see.

[Hameet Dhillon]

The real life consequences of that in recruiting, in morale, in just staffing and in the mental health of the people involved. It's really tough to be constantly under fire and then not have, you know, even to get confirmed. I was blessed because I was with a national position. I got 52 votes. Lisa Murkowski didn't vote for me, not that I'm keeping track. But.

I was blessed because you could be in limbo forever. You could be in limbo for a long time. That's very destructive to your mental health and your economic well being. It's really difficult. And so I'm not sure that everyone in D.C. is putting themselves in the shoes of the patriots who stepped up to help this administration and, and have.

[Miranda Devine]

Such a short time to do it.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Really. We're almost at a year now. I'm not even eight months into my job, but it feels like I've got so much to do in such a period of time. And so, and really, if the midterm.

[Miranda Devine]

Elections, if the Democrats win, then everything's.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Going to be, oh, everyone gets investigated and we get all the same lawfare as the pat as the past. You still have these January 6th alternate electorate cases going on in the states. In some states. Some states have dismissed them, some states have not. You know, so there's just a lot of cruelty. We're in the end of 2025 and stuff that happened five and six years ago is just bubbling its way through the courts. And it's. I know a lot of people out there who are watching this are going to be Very impatient as to why aren't there arrests? Why aren't things going on? Well, we're doing things the right way in this Department of Justice. We are giving people the presumption of innocence. We are investigating. We are not dictating conclusions and we are very determined. But you can't just go out and arrest people without the Democrats do. They did it. But that's not right. No, that's not ethical. I like to say that I work at the United States Department of Justice, not the United States Department of Prosecutions. And so that's a distinction that they teach you in law school. And they teach you. It's actually in the prosecutorial code of many bar bar associations. Prosecutors are not meant to just dunk on as many fish in a barrel as they technically can. They're meant to do justice. And that means sometimes you look at a fact pattern, you say, no, I'm not going to do that to that person. Or I can't really make out the case, or it isn't fair. Yeah, I could drag them through many years of litigation, but ultimately not get a conviction. You're supposed to make that judgment, call up front and say, it's not going to end up where we need it to be. And that doesn't do justice. We're not going to go there. And more prosecutors need to have that attitude. I'm a prosecutor. I'm the top hate crime prosecutor in the country. And so we look at that every day. We prosecute police for police misconduct. We prosecute the Face Act. So you have to make a judgment call every time you do that.

[Miranda Devine]

And that it's an enormous amount of power.

[Hameet Dhillon]

It's enormous amount of power and privilege. And, you know, I come to it with more years of experience than most people who take this job. And so I feel like 33 years of practicing law has really given me some judgment that, you know, maybe some younger people wouldn't have. And so having also worked in a lot of different settings, I think is really useful. And so well, America is very lucky.

[Miranda Devine]

To have you there in the chair. Hamit. Dylan, thank you so much for your time.

[Hameet Dhillon]

Thanks for having me.

[Miranda Devine]

Thank you so much for watching. I'm Miranda Devine. We'll be back with more soon. Let us know what you thought of this episode by leaving a comment below. Also, make sure you hit the like and subscribe buttons so you don't miss any future episodes of Pod Force One.

[Hameet Dhillon]

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