California Republican leader under consideration for key Department of Justice post

Harmeet Dhillon, a California GOP leader, is under consideration to run the civil rights branch of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The post will be heavily scrutinized given the Trump administration’s positions on issues such as voting rights, and because of past controversial statements about race made by the department’s leader, U.S. Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. A series of hate crimes have also taken place in the weeks since Trump’s election.

Dhillon declined comment, but a source said she was interviewed for the job last week in Washington, D.C.

A San Francisco attorney who is California’s Republican National Committeewoman, Dhillon has been the public face of the state GOP in recent years. The largest stage was at the Republican National Convention last summer, when the Indian-born American citizen delivered an invocation by singing a Sikh prayer in Punjabi.

The media savvy 48-year-old has been in the public eye since she was in college. As the editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, she received national media attention when she defended the weekly publication after it published a satirical column likening the college president, who was Jewish, to Adolf Hitler, and the effects of his campus policies to the Holocaust.

Dhillon has never held public office, but has been active in Bay Area politics for more than a decade, leading her to run successfully for vice chair of the state GOP in 2013.

Party leadership backed her in face of attacks by a minority of fellow Republicans who labeled her a “Taj Mahal princess,” circulated rumors that she was a sympathizer with Muslim terrorists and predicted that she would slaughter a goat at the convention’s lectern.

Only one of the attacks against her was based on ideology – Dhillon served for two years on the board of the Bay Area chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, a group that is often vilified by the right.

Dhillon previously said she got involved with the ACLU in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when fellow Sikhs were under attack. Her activism on behalf of Sikhs was also personal – in 1995, her then-husband, a Sikh doctor, was shot in New York City by a man who mistook him for a Hindu. He survived.

This chapter of her life is notable given the current climate – there have been attacks against Indian men in three states in recent days. Two died.

Dhillon has been a vocal supporter of Trump, leading the pledge of allegiance at a San Jose rally last year and representing California Republicans who were beaten outside of it in a lawsuit against the city, its mayor and police chief.

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