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DOJ Civil Rights Division hire resigned from Alabama firm over Facebook post following George Floyd's murder
DOJ Civil Rights Division hire resigned from Alabama firm over Facebook post following George Floyd's murder
Daniel Flickinger was one of the DOJ lawyers who sued Harvard on Friday. As recently as last June, he was still fighting in court over the fallout from the 2020 Facebook post.
Chris Geidner
Mar 21, 2026
On Friday morning, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging that the university’s actions relating to Jewish and Israeli students violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... The Harvard Crimson provided coverage from campus, and The New York Times also covered the lawsuit — the Trump administration’s latest attack on Harvard — but, focused as Law Dork has been on DOJ’s degradation, the signatories of the lawsuit seemed worth checking out.
One of the signatories — Daniel Flickinger — was still engaged in the summer of 2025 in a five-year-old dispute relating to a “hypothetical” he posed in a post on his personal Facebook page in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder musing about whether “a seven-time felon“ would “choose to die in a fentanyl and methamphetamine numbed strangulation“ if it would lead to “being worshipped in a nationwide funeral and my family receiving millions of dollars.“
Flickinger concluded the June 2020 post: “Purely hypothetical.” ... The Alabama Supreme Court concluded the post was “apparently” about Floyd. ... On Friday, Flickinger was listed as “senior counsel” in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Not hypothetical. ... Nearly everyone on the Harvard lawsuit is either a political appointee or a new hire since Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division head, took over.
This is, in part, because most of the longtime Civil Rights Division lawyers left the division during Dhillon’s first year in office. As Bloomberg Law’s Suzanne Monyak and Ben Penn reported in August 2025, “Out of roughly 400 division attorneys at the start of the Trump administration, about 300 have left this year, Dhillon said on a Breitbart News podcast Aug. 17.“
{snip}
Daniel Flickinger was one of the DOJ lawyers who sued Harvard on Friday. As recently as last June, he was still fighting in court over the fallout from the 2020 Facebook post.
Chris Geidner
Mar 21, 2026
On Friday morning, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging that the university’s actions relating to Jewish and Israeli students violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... The Harvard Crimson provided coverage from campus, and The New York Times also covered the lawsuit — the Trump administration’s latest attack on Harvard — but, focused as Law Dork has been on DOJ’s degradation, the signatories of the lawsuit seemed worth checking out.
One of the signatories — Daniel Flickinger — was still engaged in the summer of 2025 in a five-year-old dispute relating to a “hypothetical” he posed in a post on his personal Facebook page in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder musing about whether “a seven-time felon“ would “choose to die in a fentanyl and methamphetamine numbed strangulation“ if it would lead to “being worshipped in a nationwide funeral and my family receiving millions of dollars.“
Flickinger concluded the June 2020 post: “Purely hypothetical.” ... The Alabama Supreme Court concluded the post was “apparently” about Floyd. ... On Friday, Flickinger was listed as “senior counsel” in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Not hypothetical. ... Nearly everyone on the Harvard lawsuit is either a political appointee or a new hire since Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division head, took over.
This is, in part, because most of the longtime Civil Rights Division lawyers left the division during Dhillon’s first year in office. As Bloomberg Law’s Suzanne Monyak and Ben Penn reported in August 2025, “Out of roughly 400 division attorneys at the start of the Trump administration, about 300 have left this year, Dhillon said on a Breitbart News podcast Aug. 17.“
{snip}