Sign up for free email updates from The Watchdog. You’ll be notified whenever we publish our latest award-winning investigative reporting, John Boyle’s Answer Man and Opinion columns, Tom Fiedler’s Democracy Watch, and more!
The warning shot fired at the Buncombe County Commission came in an email dated Sept. 4. The message: Proceeding with an ambitious program to give meaningful reparations to the community’s Black citizens may land you in court.
As Asheville Watchdog reported last week, the sender was Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and not a person to make idle threats. A former Republican Party committeewoman known to be among President Trump’s fiercest legal warriors, Dhillon’s eagerness to fight “woke” policies came clear in the letter.
Dhillon implied the administration would not tolerate any Asheville or Buncombe attempts to direct local tax dollars to ameliorating generations of institutional harm beginning with slavery and continuing for 155 years through discriminatory practices. (City council members were cc’d on the letter.)…