How Grievances at the Harvard Law Review Became Ammunition for the White House

It was November 2023, the Harvard Law Review was embroiled in bitter debates over a blog post that described the war in Gaza as a genocide, and Daniel F. Wasserman was fed up.

“A proposal to block the publication of a blog is out of the ordinary for typical blog posts, but then again most blog posts on international humanitarian law don’t ignore barbaric acts of terrorism,” Wasserman, then a second-year Harvard Law School student, wrote in an email blast to the Law Review’s members.

Wasserman was angry that the blog post addressed Israeli violence against Palestinians, but not Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel. He was angry because he felt Jewish perspectives were not considered at a meeting among HLR leaders to discuss the post. And he was angry because he thought the HLR’s Diversity Committee had a say in whether the post was published, but he and most of the publication’s members didn’t.

In the end, the Law Review did not publish the blog post.

But for Wasserman, the dispute was only the beginning. A committed conservative, Wasserman believed that selection policies that took race and gender into account were discriminatory. For him, the Diversity Committee’s moment of assertiveness was emblematic of what he saw as deeper rot in the Law Review — a tangle of antisemitism, anti-white racism, and rejection of meritocracy.

This spring, those accusations exploded into the open, and the Law Review found itself facing claims that both its article review process and selection of new members were skewed against white male applicants.

When, in April 2025, internal HLR documents began leaking to the Washington Free Beacon, the Law Review’s leaders determined that Wasserman was behind it. When the leaks turned into a flood, the Law Review continued to suspect Wasserman. And when the Justice Department became the third federal agency to launch an investigation into the Law Review, Wasserman was a cooperating witness.

Through interviews with Law Review members and recent graduates, reviews of leaked documents, and several previously unreported internal communications, The Crimson traced how debates within the HLR started long before this spring’s investigations and public uproar.

The same fights — over race, affirmative action, and academic freedom — that put the HLR in the spotlight have played out within the white clapboard walls of Gannett House since at least fall 2023, when the Law Review’s feud over the Israel-Palestine conflict turned into a clash over its own diversity policies.

Wasserman, now an aide in Donald Trump’s White House, has now graduated. Many of his peers on the Law Review have left Harvard, too. But what started as a student organization’s schism has spiraled outward, turning into yet another tool for the Trump administration in its campaign against Harvard.

Both Harvard and Wasserman declined to comment for this story. In a late May statement, Law Review president G. Terrell Seabrooks rejected the accusations of race discrimination and wrote that the publication “takes all allegations and investigations seriously and is, of course, committed to complying with all applicable laws.”

Old Divisions

In January, when Trump took office, Wasserman’s beliefs were suddenly in power. Entire federal agencies were willing to muster their institutional resources behind his principles — and wield investigations as cudgels to punish Harvard.

But in the year and a half before, the Law Review was hashing out some of the same questions internally — including debates on the role of racial diversity in its article and membership selection. Its members did so in a charged environment.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions, had profound aftershocks at the Law School: the number of new Black admits was cut in half in the first year after the decision. And the war in Gaza drove a rift through the student body.

The November 2023 blog post that drew Wasserman’s ire, written by Palestinian human rights lawyer and HLS doctoral candidate Rabea Eghbariah, was initially slated to be published on a quick turnaround before the end of the semester.

Then the Law Review’s president at the time, Apsara Iyer, hit the brakes. Harvard students were being doxxed and blacklisted over even the most tenuous associations with controversial pro-Palestine statements, and Iyer didn’t want to drag the Law Review into the mess.

The Law Review’s top student officers met with the blog chairs and the leaders of the Diversity Committee on Nov. 9, 2023, to address the brewing crisis. Over four tense hours, the group decided not to publish the article under the sped-up timeline. (A vote at a separate, later meeting eventually killed the article entirely.)

The Diversity Committee, known as DivComm, hosts social gatherings and professional programming for Law Review editors from diverse backgrounds. It has never officially held an editorial role, and its recommendations at the Nov. 9 meeting were not implemented.

But a faction of Law Review editors, including Wasserman, was indignant to discover that DivComm had been called into the deliberations.

The DivComm chairs sent an email to the Law Review list explaining its role in the meeting. In response, Wasserman fired off his Nov. 12 email, parodying the DivComm message and claiming to represent a group called “JewComm.”

“JewComm’s role in the November 9th meeting was nonexistent because we were not invited,” Wasserman wrote.

That was not the end of the DivComm controversy. Two months later, some of the second-year law students who were preparing to helm the HLR next year tried to place limits on the one domain where it held formal involvement in an editorial process.

Each January, the incoming leadership of the Law Review vote on transition resolutions — amendments to the Law Review’s processes which can be vetoed by the president, but generally pass with a simple majority vote.

In January 2024, a proposed resolution called for modifying the foreword selection committee — a body tasked with selecting an essay from an eminent legal scholar to introduce the Law Review’s flagship issue.

The committee includes one representative internally selected from DivComm and one from the Women’s, Nonbinary, and Trans Committee. But the proposal suggested that those representatives should be removed, and the organization’s vice president for coordination, diversity, and outreach should instead join as “an advocate for underrepresented perspectives.”

The proposed resolution failed — with only eight of the Law Review’s 52 executives voting to make the change.

At the same time, incoming HLR leaders considered a proposal that would pare back the role of personal identity in the Law Review’s editor selection process.

Joining the Law Review is a mark of prestige among HLS students, and the competition to be one of the 54 second-year students invited to the Review is fierce. Each year, 20 students are selected based on their arguments in a legal writing competition, and 10 are elected based on the competition and their grades. Another 24 are chosen through a holistic review procedure that also considers their personal statements — the only space in the application process that lets candidates disclose their identities.

The holistic review process has been a linchpin for the Law Review’s critics, who have argued that it invites students to leverage their race, gender, or sexuality to get selected — and allows the Law Review to disfavor white men.

The HLR has reiterated in recent months that it does not confer advantages to candidates based on their race alone, and that the selection committee is instructed to consider race only in the context of how it has shaped their experiences and attributes as an applicant.

But the January 2024 proposal shows that some students had misgivings about the holistic review process long before it became a political lightning rod.

Thirty percent of the leadership board — below the amendment threshold — voted to decrease the fraction of editors selected to the Law Review from holistic review. A note accompanying the proposal described concerns over the “lack of transparency of the holistic review process.”

While that vote failed, a proposal requiring that any additional editors selected to the Law Review be chosen through grades and writing competition scores passed, with 68 percent in favor.

A small contingent of students also began to independently protest the Law Review’s article selection criteria, which include a rubric considering submissions’ “impact” that critics have accused of favoring left-leaning arguments.

The rubric asks students to evaluate whether each submission will have a “foreseeable impact in enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “challenge any existing biases in the practice and knowledge production of law.”

In thousands of pages of memos from the 2024 article selection process leaked to the Free Beacon, seven editors consistently left this section entirely blank. One student who did not fill out the section said in an interview that he and others left it empty to protest the “impact” criterion.

New Scrutiny

The first Free Beacon article was published on April 25. Drawing on internal spreadsheets, Slack screenshots, article evaluations, and reams of transition resolutions, it accused the Law Review of a “pattern of pervasive race discrimination.” The claims took on a granular level of detail — racial favoritism in expediting article submissions, “brazen bean counting” in soliciting the November foreword.

The coverage drew instant national attention to the Law Review. That evening, scores of first-year law students received emails threatening a lawsuit against the publication, urging them to retain their own application records for discovery, and mocking the supposedly discriminatory selection process in offensive terms.

Days later, two federal agencies — armed with the leaked documents and recently published accusations of discrimination — launched an investigation into the Law Review’s alleged violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based discrimination at federally funded institutions.

And in May, the Justice Department sent three letters about the Law Review to Harvard, according to the New York Times. The letters accused the publication of discriminating against white men — and of retaliating against Wasserman.

Even before Wasserman’s participation as a cooperating witness was disclosed, the Law Review had already determined that Wasserman was involved with the Free Beacon leaks. The publication instructed him to stop distributing documents and retrieve or destroy documents he had already shared with others, and shortly after it issued him a reprimand.

To the Justice Department, it looked like the Law Review had asked Wasserman to destroy evidence. The department asked Harvard to make the publication retract its orders to Wasserman and wipe the reprimand from his record.

Under pressure, the Law Review eventually complied.

Shortly after, the Free Beacon published an article with excerpts from the reprimand emails sent to Wasserman. The Law Review told Wasserman it had identified him as the probable leaker based on his downloads of HLR files, according to the emails.

In a statement, the Law Review’s student leaders denied that the publication had violated whistleblower or anti-retaliation laws and wrote that they remain “in compliance with federal laws and regulations.”

Even as the backlash over DEI at the Law Review expanded, public anger against the publication suddenly turned back to the other charge that Harvard has struggled with: that pro-Palestine protests had fed a surge in antisemitism.

The new controversy erupted when Ibrahim Bharmal, then a third-year HLS student, was awarded a $65,000 fellowship to spend a year working for a Muslim civil rights organization. Bharmal had been charged with assault and battery for his involvement in a confrontation at a pro-Palestine protest at Harvard Business School in October 2023.

At the protest, Bharmal and a fellow graduate student had attempted to block an Israeli student from filming participants’ faces, as fellow demonstrators shouted “shame.” The two were eventually required to participate in court-mandated anger management classes and community service as part of a pretrial diversion program.

Like the allegations of anti-white racism, Bharmal’s award quickly became fuel for not only investigations into the Law Review but into Harvard itself.

On May 13, when the Trump administration froze another $450 million to Harvard, a federal press release described the Law Review’s decision to award Bharmal the fellowship as “even more troubling” than its alleged racial discrimination. When the Department of Health and Human Services found Harvard in violation of Title VI, the department cited Bharmal’s fellowship to claim that the University had ignored antisemitic harassment.

Meanwhile, a billboard truck circled Harvard Square during Commencement with Bharmal’s face and a description of the charges against him plastered on digital displays on its sides. Later, a second truck drove by, displaying the message, “Why is HLR giving a violent antisemite $65,000 to work for a pro-Hamas hate group?”

Both Wasserman and Bharmal were still at HLS and involved with the Law Review, though neither was on the publication’s current staff during their final semester of law school. The fact that Bharmal remained in good standing with the Law Review had galled Wasserman, who saw it as an example of antisemitism going unpunished.

Now that both were engulfed in the flurry of public attention, the animosity between them flared up on the Law Review’s Slack channel.

On June 2, when the New York Times published its article disclosing that Wasserman was cooperating with the Trump administration, Bharmal sent a Slack message saying that he was ashamed that Wasserman had “colluded” with the Trump administration.

In response, Wasserman wrote that he was “ashamed you were never disciplined for assaulting a Jewish student on campus!”

“I hope the court-mandated anger management classes start working soon!” he added.

Bharmal did not respond to a request for comment on the Slack messages or the controversy surrounding his fellowship.

Even as Law School students left campus for the summer, the leaks continued. On June 19, the Free Beacon published the more than 2,000-page collection of memos from the Law Review’s 2024 article selection process, drawing another round of controversy.

In total, tens of thousands of internal documents have been released, sourced from separate committees within the Law Review. A member of the Law Review’s leadership said that when the first leaks went public, HLR executives determined that Wasserman alone had modified and downloaded the exposed documents. The student claimed that each of the leaked documents was available to the entire Law Review body — so Wasserman would have had access to all of them.

The Crimson was not able to independently determine who had downloaded or had access to the full set of documents that have been made public. But article evaluations are generally shared with all Law Review editors, according to files reviewed by The Crimson.

Now, almost everyone who was part of the November 2023 fight over Eghbariah’s article has graduated. The Law Review editors welcomed its new class of editors in late July. But the investigations have ground on — though with little clarity. Law Review representatives wrote in a statement to The Crimson that the publication “has not received a direct request from any federal agency in connection with any ongoing investigation.”

In May, the Law Review announced that it had hired a white-shoe national law firm, Munger, Tolles & Olson, to review its operations. In early June, the Law Review met with legal counsel to assess the ongoing federal investigations. So far, the Law Review’s leaders believe there is no indication that anyone besides Wasserman is working with the government — even as the trickle of leaks continued into June.

An official from the HHS confirmed that the investigation into the Harvard Law Review is ongoing but declined to comment further. The DOJ declined to comment altogether, and the Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment regarding the status of the investigations.

—Staff writer Megan L. Blonigen can be reached at megan.blonigen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @MeganBlonigen.

—Staff writer Caroline G. Hennigan can be reached at caroline.hennigan@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @cghennigan.