Trump Officials Tried to Claim Harvard Letter Was Sent by Mistake After University Publicly Rejected Demands

On Monday, after Harvard University publicly rejected a series of authoritarian demands Trump administration officials sent to Harvard the previous Friday, one of those officials tried out a novel de-escalation technique: He frantically called the university up and insisted the letter had been sent by mistake.

That original letter, sent April 11, ordered Harvard to comply with numerous outlandish demands, among them discontinuing diversity efforts, limiting or outright banning student protests, installing right-wing faculty essentially hand-picked by the administration and spying on international students.

Harvard President Alan Garber condemned these demands in a statement released the morning of April 14, saying in part, “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

But the New York Times reported Friday that shortly after Garber’s letter went public, Josh Gruenbaum, a top lawyer at the General Services Administration, made “a frantic call” to one of Harvard’s attorneys and insisted the letter was “unauthorized” and shouldn’t have been sent.

From here things get murkier. NYT reports that three different Trump officials, speaking anonymously, said there are “differing accounts” as to what actually happened, and why.

Meanwhile, White House policy strategist May Mailman effectively told NYT the administration stands by the letter. Curiously, she also said in a statement that “it was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers” not to have called the White House before going public about the letter’s demands.

In its own statement to NYT, Harvard shut down Mailman’s assertion, noting that the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government — even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach — do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”

“It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say. But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on students and employees and “the standing of American higher education in the world,” the statement continued.

Since Monday, the Trump administration has only escalated things further. On Tuesday, it froze Harvard’s public funding in order to punish the school for fighting back. And on Wednesday Trump himself ordered the IRS to revoke the school’s tax exempt status. So far that drastic step hasn’t happened — and legal experts say Harvard will likely win any legal challenge it brings should it happen.

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