9 prosecutors quit US Justice Department en masse over ‘sham’ UC antisemitism probe

JTA — Nine federal prosecutors, including at least one Jew, recently resigned from the Justice Department over what they described as the Trump administration’s “fraudulent” handling of its ongoing antisemitism investigation targeting the University of California system.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last week, the attorneys described an “unserious” and “sham” investigation fueled primarily by Trump’s desire for retribution against higher education and increasingly untethered to legal standing.

“I am highly skeptical of whether this administration actually cares about Jewish people or antisemitism,” said Dena Robinson, a Jewish and Black former senior trial attorney who had volunteered to interview students on three UC campuses for the investigation. Several of the attorneys assigned to UC wound up accepting a deferred-resignation offer in May and left the investigation.

A separate investigation, released last week by ProPublica and the Chronicle for Higher Education, also found that the Trump Justice Department was pressuring investigators to “find” evidence that UCLA had tolerated antisemitism, beyond established legal and procedural norms for such cases.

This rare glimpse behind the curtain of federal antisemitism cases comes as Jewish groups, on campus and off, have become increasingly uncomfortable with the Trump administration’s strong-arming of universities in the name of fighting antisemitism.

Several high-profile schools, including multiple Ivy League universities, have struck deals with the administration, in most cases agreeing to large payouts and extensive policy changes in exchange for unfreezing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants.

The UC investigation, which targets the statewide public university system, is seen as one of Trump’s most sought-after prizes. The administration froze more than $580 million in federal funds — an amount that has been whittled to $230 million following court cases — and is pressuring the school system to resolve the case with a $1.2 billion payout, though a federal judge recently blocked their efforts to impose such a fine.

The attorneys told the Times that there was some evidence that Jewish and Israeli students on UC campuses, most notably UCLA, had been discriminated against — but that the amount of resources and attention being thrown at the case was disproportionate.

“I think there were absolutely Jewish people on campuses that faced legitimate discrimination,” one unnamed attorney who had interviewed students at UCLA and UC Davis told the Times. “But the way we were pushed so hard to investigate, it was clear to so many of us that this was a political hit job that actually would end up not helping anyone.”

Ron Avi Astor, a Jewish Zionist faculty member at UCLA who had been targeted by pro-Palestinian protesters over his research into peace initiatives between Israelis and Palestinians, had championed protest restrictions the campus implemented prior to Trump’s reelection. His account of being targeted by the protesters would form a key piece of evidence for the UCLA investigation. Yet Astor told ProPublica that Trump’s cuts to research funds were deeply concerning.

“These are things that save people’s lives. Why are we messing with that? It’s a tool that anyone who’s a scholar would abhor,” he said. “It looks like we’re being used.”

Under Trump, according to ProPublica, antisemitism investigations that could take a year or more under previous administrations were now expected to wrap up in much less time, with an expected finding of wrongdoing by the university. Teams of lawyers were dispatched to multiple UC campuses to interview students in whirlwind time.

Ultimately, the investigation began to focus on UCLA, which offered the most compelling evidence of antisemitism after the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. On that campus, pro-Palestinian protesters had blocked “Zionists” from accessing certain areas. A brawl also broke out between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups on campus.

Earlier this year, the UC system paid more than $6 million to settle an antisemitism lawsuit brought against it by Jewish groups who said students had faced discrimination at UCLA in 2024. Part of the settlement money went to Jewish groups. Yet it had no effect on the Trump investigation, which found UCLA in violation of Title VI civil rights law for the same complaints it had just settled.

Pomona College, a private school in Los Angeles that had experienced elevated levels of antisemitism after October 7, quietly settled its own Title VI antisemitism investigation this month without any payouts to Trump.