Trump’s DOJ Pressured Lawyers to “Find” Evidence that UCLA Had Illegally Tolerated Antisemitism

On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed.

Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus. Milliken quickly packed up and made the five-hour drive to Denver to catch the next flight to California.

The grant freeze was the latest salvo in the administration’s broader campaign against elite universities, which it has pilloried as purveyors of antisemitism and “woke” indoctrination. Over the next four months, the Justice Department targeted UCLA with its full playbook for bringing colleges to heel, threatening it with multiple discrimination lawsuits, demanding more than $1 billion in fines and pressing for a raft of changes on the conservative wish list for overhauling higher education.