When the Trump administration didn't turn around deportation flights that were already over international waters at the verbal directive of a judge, mainstream media widely characterized the move as willful violation of a court order. An appeals court later threw out U.S. District Judge James Boasberg's contempt finding, saying he lacked authority.

Elite journalists, however, have entirely ignored months of whistleblower allegations that Biden administration officials willfully violated a written court order to stop threatening the federal funding of school districts that resist its novel view, never enshrined in binding regulations, that Title IX protects gender identity despite the law explicitly limiting itself to "sex."

Perhaps more surprising, the Trump administration has given no update on its own investigation of the allegations, which the lame-duck Biden administration dismissed, but the new administration resurrected almost a year ago.

"At the very least, there should be consequences for any employees who are still with the Department of Education" and intentionally ignored the July 2022 injunction against the Biden administration, Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt, whose group is representing the whistleblower, told Just the News, No Noise.  

The group has "reason to believe that some of them still may be," said Leavitt, a former investigator for Iowa GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley and now a lawmaker in West Virginia, one of several GOP-led states that sued to block the Title IX enforcement as a violation of regulatory rulemaking obligations under the Administrative Procedure Act.

It wants the department to "identify who ignored the court orders, who has culpability, where discipline is necessary," because "it's very difficult to prevent something like this from happening in the future if there aren't consequences for this kind of bad action in the past."

While federal employees "definitely could be held in contempt …  if they disregarded a court order," prosecuting them "is a more complicated legal issue," he cautioned.

"Court orders are not suggestions to be ignored when bureaucrats disagree with them," Empower Oversight said in a one-page summary recently given to Just the News. "The latest information we have is that the follow-up report" by the Office for Special Counsel "should be completed soon, and we will ensure it is released to the public at that time."

It said OSC gave the department until March 12, 2025, to answer Empower Oversight's Jan. 21, 2025, objections to the department's own exoneration of its staff Dec. 12, 2024. 

Corey Williams, OSC interim communications director, told Just the News on Friday it couldn't comment on any potential action in response to the whistleblower, while the Department of Education didn't respond. The College Fix reported a month ago that it spent a month trying to get an update from both, to no avail.

'Unsubstantiated' allegations because there's no 'paper trail'?

The 2022 injunction by U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley, nominated by President Trump, validated years of accusations that the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights under Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR in both Obama and Biden administrations, enforced nonbinding guidance through threats to federal funding.

The Title IX guidance documents cited their basis as the Supreme Court's Bostock precedent on employment discrimination against transgender people under Title VII, which explicitly instructed lower courts not to extend the holding to bathrooms, locker rooms and dress codes, much less apply it beyond Title VII.

OCR attorney Timothy Mattson, who then led its Kansas City office and remains with OCR, first brought his allegations to OSC via Empower Oversight in spring 2024.

The letter accused Lhamon of committing two "prohibited personnel practices" against Mattson when he disclosed OCR's violation of the injunction "to his chain of command."

She told him "not to put in writing anything that reflects disagreement with the Department" and "subtly threatened a personnel action" for disclosing an OCR violation and refusing to obey an order "Mattson believed would require him to violate a law, rule, or regulation," the letter reads.

Mattson had learned from his supervisor's call with Lhamon that the OCR chief "planned to disregard advice provided to her" by the department's general counsel and Justice Department and "continue processing transgender cases irrespective of the court order."

She told enforcement and regional directors that "she wanted to share her intentions via email" but didn't want to create a "paper trail." Lhamon also promised staff would receive government representation if they were held in contempt of court for violating the injunction at her direction and that she would ultimately take the fall, Mattson said.

Lhamon left OCR when the second Trump administration began and is now the inaugural executive director of the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California Berkeley law school. 

Her dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, told The College Fix last fall that Mattson's allegations are "unsubstantiated" and "they do not change our confidence" in Lhamon, who is "widely recognized for her integrity and commitment to civil rights" and has a sterling record in public interest law and "high-level government positions."

Chemerinsky did not respond to Just the News requests to specify what he asked Lhamon when he learned the allegations, her response, whether he required a paper trail to change his mind – as Lhamon allegedly sought to avoid – and whether Berkeley Law would also require a paper trail if a whistleblower made similar allegations against an administrator.

Government's reading of injunction is 'nonsensical' and 'pure sophistry'

The department's Dec. 12, 2024, response through OSC concocted a "bait-and-switch," saying its actions were consistent with DOJ's notice of compliance to Atchley following the injunction, rather than the injunction itself, Empower Oversight's Jan. 21, 2025 response said.

The government's reading of the injunction as only prohibiting citations to "challenged documents" is "nonsensical" and "pure sophistry," given that Atchley repeatedly said the "content" of the guidance unlawfully advances "new interpretations" of Title IX and imposes "new legal obligations," the response said.

"OCR has repeatedly opened investigations—and resolved investigations—based on the interpretation of Title IX set forth in the challenged documents," which contradict Atchley's findings and OCR's own representation that the documents are nonbinding, it said.

They include probes against school districts that "simply restricted athletic competition to biological sex" and "declined to change the student’s name and pronouns in their academic records and restricted bathroom use to biological sex." 

The department was particularly disingenuous about its investigation of Oklahoma's Owasso Public Schools following the suicide of nonbinary student Nex Benedict, Empower Oversight's response says. 

Then-Secretary Miguel Cardona tweeted about Benedict, saying, "We all have a role to play" ensuring transgender and nonbinary students "feel safe in schools," the same day the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign asked him for an investigation. 

At that point, it became apparent OCR was "committed to investigating discrimination based on gender identity" in the district, the response says.

Mattson notified OSC after the deputy assistant secretary asked his office to investigate based on the HRC letter, his enforcement director changed the subject of the probe to "gender identity" from "sex stereotypes," and Lhamon demanded Kansas City investigate gender identity discrimination "as part of the case," transferring it to Chicago when Mattson refused.

OCR's claim that its resolution letter with Owasso "did not rely on the theory that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes discrimination on the basis of gender identity" is directly contradicted by the letter itself, which repeatedly refers to gender identity both in its findings and analysis sections, the response says.

Leavitt cited the Owasso investigation to Just the News, No Noise as a prime example of "political pressure" driving OCR to violate the injunction.

When the feds probe school districts for alleged legal violations, it "really kind of coerces them into saying, well, we'll do whatever we need to do to get out from under your scrutiny here" and enables the feds to "bully them into compliance," he said. "There were potentially dozens of cases," if only the department will disclose them.