A Trump administration lackey only has herself — and a single tweet — to blame for the epic smackdown she received in court last week, a legal expert said Wednesday.
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President Donald Trump’s civil rights chief at the Justice Department, Harmeet Dhillon’s recent demand were rejected by a federal judge last week because of her own public commentary, legal expert Liz Dye wrote for Public Notice.
The case stemmed from a conservative influencer, Nick Sortor, who claimed he suffered from unlawful police force during an arrest for trying to snatch a burning American flag from a protester in Portland, Oregon.
Dhillon then accused Portland Police of discriminating against conservatives, and demanding they turn over their records for an investigation — citing a 2014 consent decree between the federal government and Portland over excessive force against suspects with mental illness.
U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon denied Dhillon’s attempt to enforce the consent decree. Dye argued this was likely because of Dhillon’s social media posts.
Dhillon — whose Civil Rights Division “has shrunk by about 75 percent and now devotes most of its energy to harassing trans students and attempting to bully election officials into handing over state voter rolls” — posted a gloating message that she was about to make the Portland Police pay for interfering with Sortor, Dye reported.
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“Portland: it’s FO time. Buckle up,” Dhillon wrote. (“FO” is internet slang for “find out.”)
This statement was especially damning, argued Dye, because Dhillon also has a history of disparaging consent decrees intended to rein in police brutality.
Dye contended this showed Dhillon didn’t actually care about the Portland consent decree and was weaponizing it to empower right-wing vigilantism against protesters.
In 2025, Dye said, after former Attorney General Pam Bondi terminated consent decrees with Minneapolis and Louisville for the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Dhillon took to X and boasted, “The weaponization of consent decrees ended when I took over this @CivilRights Division. Under @AGPamBondi’s leadership, we support our law enforcement and we are terminating outdated consent decrees. Less red tape, more safety!”
Ultimately, said Dye, Judge Simon “refused to allow the consent decree … to be perverted to punish the Portland Police Bureau for ‘discriminating’ against a conservative agitator” — and to do so, “he cited the government’s own social media posts as dispositive evidence undermining its in-court claims.”
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