One of Donald Trump’s senior Department of Justice officials has been ridiculed after she called out a rival’s “pretentiousness” and lack of “street cred”—by boasting that she studied ancient Greek and Latin at an Ivy League college.
Harmeet Dhillon, who has become known for being outspoken on social media, got into an online spat with a respected legal activist, only to hand herself a humiliating self-own.
The dust-up started Tuesday when Ed Whelan rushed to Judge Patrick J. Schiltz’s defense online following reports that the judge appeared on a 2019 donor-and-volunteer list for a nonprofit providing legal aid to low-income migrants.
Citing language from judicial ethics guidance, he noted that federal judges may give money to legal services organizations that represent the poor and are not required to recuse themselves simply because lawyers from those groups appear before them.
That prompted Dhillon—Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights—to ask Whelan on X whether he had any clients or actually practiced law in court. Whelan replied that her question was irrelevant and pointed to his decades of work promoting originalism and tracking judicial nominations.
Dhillon then fired off the tweet that blew up: “I majored in Ancient Greek and Latin at Dartmouth. Your pretentiousness merely underscores your utter lack of street cred.”
Whelan quipped that he was glad the classics major “knows what non compos mentis means.”
In Latin, compos mentis means “of sound mind.” Lawyers use the phrase non compos mentis to describe someone who is not mentally competent.
X users also piled on. Commentator Tom Nichols deadpanned, “Street cred?” while another user joked that two “dead languages” gave her about as much street cred as a Mormon missionary.
One reply sarcastically dropped the famous Ron Burgundy Anchorman line: “I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”
Others simply asked, “Is the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division okay?”
The Daily Beast has contacted Dhillon for comment.
The fight comes as Schiltz, a George W. Bush appointee, has become a hero to immigration advocates by threatening to hold acting ICE Director Todd Lyons in contempt over the administration’s Minneapolis crackdown, as previously reported by the Daily Beast.
