The New York Times reports that a Trump official made a frantic call to Harvard soon after the school’s president rejected the administration’s demands, which had been communicated by letter a few days earlier:
The April 11 letter from the White House’s task force on antisemitism, this official told Harvard, should not have been sent and was “unauthorized,” two people familiar with the matter said. The letter was sent by the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, Sean Keveney, according to three other people, who were briefed on the matter. Mr. Keveney is a member of the antisemitism task force.
It is unclear what prompted the letter to be sent last Friday. Its content was authentic, the three people said, but there were differing accounts inside the administration of how it had been mishandled. Some people at the White House believed it had been sent prematurely, according to the three people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal discussions. Others in the administration thought it had been meant to be circulated among the task force members rather than sent to Harvard.
But its timing was consequential. The letter arrived when Harvard officials believed they could still avert a confrontation with President Trump. Over the previous two weeks, Harvard and the task force had engaged in a dialogue. But the letter’s demands were so extreme that Harvard concluded that a deal would ultimately be impossible.
Senior White House policy strategist May Mailman even sort of blamed Harvard’s lawyers for not confirming whether the very official-looking letter was in fact official. “It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks. Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”
It doesn’t matter now, of course. The White House didn’t withdraw the letter, and Trump and his administration immediately started retaliating after Harvard publicly stood up against them. But the report underlines how haphazard the Trump team’s big attack on America’s most powerful university has been.
