An insider at the Harvard Law Review that federal officials called a “cooperating witness” in their probe into allegations of anti-white racism among the journal’s editors now has a job at the White House, according to The New York Times.
Toward the end of April, two federal departments’ civil rights offices announced that they were investigating whether the independent, student-run legal journal’s “policies and practices for journal membership and article selection” violate federal law prohibiting recipients of federal dollars from discriminating based on race.
“Harvard Law Review’s article selection process appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a press release announcing the investigations.
In a series of private letters to Harvard University about the investigations, government officials said that they had a “cooperating witness” who was an insider at Harvard Law Review, the New York Times reported. That witness has been identified as Daniel Wasserman, a former editor at the journal who graduated from Harvard Law School last week.
The White House confirmed to the Times that Wasserman was offered a job working under Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller on April 25, just days before the investigations were announced. Wasserman began working for Miller — who the newspaper described as “the architect of the [Trump] administration’s domestic policy agenda” — on May 22.
Wasserman offered no comment to the Times when the newspaper reached him by phone through the White House switchboard on Friday. Neither Harvard Law Review, Harvard Law School nor federal officials replied to requests for comment on Wednesday.
The investigations into the journal come as the Trump administration continues its months-long feud with Harvard over the university’s rebukes of federal officials’ attempts to reshape it.
In a comment to the Times, a White House spokesman characterized Wasserman as a student whistleblower who should be a model for others. But legal experts not named in the story told the newspaper it is “highly unusual for an administration to give a cooperating witness in an ongoing investigation a White House job.”
A senior Trump administration official who was not named in the story told the Times that Wasserman was being eyed for a job at the White House “long before” the investigations into The Harvard Law Review began, and that the decision to offer him a position was not tied to his involvement in the investigations. Furthermore, Miller was not party to the hiring process for Wasserman, the official said.
In the letters about the investigations, federal officials accused Harvard Law Review’s leadership of destroying evidence relevant to the investigations and of ordering Wasserman to do so as well, the Times reported.
But Harvard Law Review claims that it simply asked him to stop sharing private documents belonging to the journal and to retrieve or destroy any copies of private documents he’d already disseminated, the newspaper reported. The journal said it still has all the original documents.
Federal officials also accused Harvard Law Review of retaliating against Wasserman, the Times reported. But the formal letter reprimanding him for violating the journal’s policies was issued before the first letter in which the government identified Wasserman as someone involved in the investigation, according to the newspaper.
In their next letter, federal officials demanded that Harvard Law Review retract the reprimand from Wasserman’s file at the journal, as well as its request that he stop sharing its private documents, the newspaper reported. Harvard Law Review complied.