Bill Barr: Democrats Are in Denial About Campus Antisemitism

Last week, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland offered a preview of the Democrats’ game plan for the coming year. As the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, he announced that he intends to launch a formal probe into what he calls the Justice Department’s “sham investigation” of antisemitism at taxpayer-funded universities.

Partisan oversight investigations are nothing new in Washington. But this one is uniquely cynical.

By Raskin’s telling, the Donald Trump administration decided to investigate antisemitism at Harvard University, Columbia University, Brown University, and Cornell University based on a single New York Post article from January 2025, which highlighted antisemitic incidents at medical school graduation ceremonies. According to a Justice Department whistleblower, the initial investigation did not yield any Title VI violations, so the administration went “on an open-sea fishing expedition” in search of antisemitism, using it as a “pretext” under which to “harass and intimidate universities on utterly false, tendentious, and distorted grounds” and “strip targeted institutions of hundreds of millions of dollars in grants.”

This completely rewrites history.