The Justice Department, intent on pursuing a criminal case against student protesters at Columbia University, argued that graffiti with a Hamas symbol outside the home of the school’s interim president threatened her life and was comparable to a racist cross burning, newly unsealed court documents show.
The documents offer new insight into a contentious fight between political appointees in the department who told the civil rights division to open the case in late February, and federal judges and career prosecutors who believed the move was risky overreach.
The records also underscore how determined the Trump administration was to press forward with a case judges viewed as weak. Justice Department leaders pushed for an investigation of a student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, but federal judges in New York rejected the administration’s efforts to get a search warrant four times, in what some veteran lawyers described as an unusually prolonged disagreement between federal prosecutors and the courts.
The release of the records came in response to a request from The New York Times, which first reported on the dispute and then filed a court motion to unseal the documents. The nonprofit news site The Intercept later joined.
The new details come at a time of heightened security concerns for Jewish Americans. Last month, two Israeli Embassy staff members were fatally shot outside the Jewish museum in Washington. On Sunday in Boulder, Colo., a man used Molotov cocktails to attack a group of people peacefully marching in support of hostages taken by Hamas. The suspects both shouted “Free Palestine” at the scenes, the authorities have said.
Campus protests against Israel’s military actions in Gaza have roiled college campuses for more than a year, particularly at Columbia. The Trump administration has promised to take on such demonstrations, saying they reflect antisemitism that must be punished. A Justice Department spokesman said Wednesday that the agency “makes no apologies for our zealous efforts to prevent violent acts by antisemitic groups.”
From the beginning, some career prosecutors believed the case threatened First Amendment protections of free speech and assembly. They resisted their superiors’ efforts to use a criminal investigation to identify and intimidate protesters, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details intended to be private.
Part of the inquiry, which appears to have stalled, focused on Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s Instagram account. To help identify student participants, prosecutors applied for a search warrant.
Three times, the documents show, Sarah Netburn, the chief magistrate judge in Manhattan federal court, rejected Justice Department arguments that a social media post by the student group constituted a criminal threat to Columbia’s interim president at the time, Katrina Armstrong.
At a March 28 hearing conducted by telephone, prosecutors said the inverted triangle spray painted on the university wall was a threatening symbol used by Hamas.
“I’m not saying that the conduct is exactly equivalent, but symbolic,” said a prosecutor who works in the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington, adding that the department had “routinely prosecuted, under various threat statutes, the burning of crosses.”
Judge Netburn, in turn, questioned whether that symbol could constitute a threat, or be understood as a threat, in the United States. After rejecting an amended complaint by the prosecutors a second time, she added an unusual instruction: If they sought approval for the search warrant from any other judge, they had to include a transcript of the telephone hearing.
When the administration appealed those decisions to John G. Koeltl, another federal judge in Manhattan, he also rejected them.
“Although the writing on the wall was reprehensible, there are statutes that cover such vandalism,” Judge Koeltl ruled.
After opening the investigation in late February, a senior Trump administration official, Emil Bove III, sought to expand the case after the group on March 14 posted a photo on its Instagram page, the people familiar with the investigation said.
The photo showed graffiti in bright red paint on the building where the university president lived, with the words “free them all” and an inverted triangle.
A caption accompanying the picture declared: “The people will not stand for Columbia University’s shameless complicity in genocide! The University’s repression has only bred more resistance and Columbia has lit a flame it can’t control. Katrina Armstrong you will not be allowed peace as you sic NYPD officers and ICE agents on your own students for opposing the genocide of the Palestinian people. WALKOUT at 12:30 PM. COLUMBIA MAIN GATES.”
Prodded by Mr. Bove, the Justice Department sought a search warrant for data associated with that account — not just who posted to the account, but the user names of those who “liked” the posts or followed the accounts. At the Justice Department, some career lawyers viewed Mr. Bove’s demands as a misuse of a criminal investigation, seeking to punish and intimidate constitutionally protected protest activity.
President Trump last week announced he would nominate Mr. Bove to be a federal appeals court judge in Philadelphia.
The federal investigation stemming from the Columbia demonstrations began shortly after masked pro-Palestinian protesters barged into Milbank Hall, a building at the Columbia-affiliated Barnard College, on Feb. 26. That protest was against the expulsion of students who had been accused of disrupting a “History of Modern Israel” class in January.
Video shows students pushing past a security guard and occupying a hallway. School officials said at the time that the guard was assaulted and taken to the hospital for minor injuries.
Shortly after that incident, prosecutors assigned to the case were told by superiors that Mr. Bove wanted a list of members of the group, and of accounts that “liked” the group’s posts, so the information be shared with immigration agents.
Inside the civil rights division, prosecutors came to fear their criminal investigation was a pretext to facilitate an intimidation and deportation campaign against student protesters. They refused to compile a list that could be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Mr. Bove’s boss, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, has defended the investigation, saying it was justified because the inverted triangle is a “symbol used by Hamas to designate targets for violence.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
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