High-ranking Biden administration officials conspired to violate a federal court order blocking their reading of Title IX as covering "gender identity," then tried to hide the effort through coercion and off-the-record directives, a Department of Education investigation has concluded, vindicating the whistleblower who put his career on the line to expose it.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel informed President Trump that the department "fully substantiated the allegations" brought by Timothy Mattson, who now leads the department's Office for Civil Rights regional office in Kansas City. OSC recommended sanctions against current and former officials, and compensation for Mattson for the risk he took in coming forward.
At the center of the findings is former OCR Director Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights under both Obama and Biden. A supplemental report made public Wednesday states that "OCR's leadership actively engaged in efforts to thwart at least one OCR regional office (Region VII) from following the plain and unambiguous meaning" of a 2022 injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley, a Trump nominee who blocked enforcement of the Biden administration's gender identity guidance in the states that sued.
Judge Atchley's injunction validated years of accusations that Lhamon's office misrepresented nonbinding guidance as legally binding, threatening federal funding for K-12 schools and colleges that didn't comply with gender identity mandates never enacted by Congress.
Days after the order came down, Lhamon told staff in a virtual meeting that she planned to "disregard the advice" of her own general counsel and the Justice Department on how to respond. Biden's OSC, which later dismissed Mattson's complaint just weeks before the presidential transition, claimed at the time that Mattson "misunderstands the scope of the Court's injunction."
The new supplemental report, compelled by the Trump administration's OSC after that dismissal, paints a different picture entirely.
Another staffer recalled Lhamon saying, in paraphrase, that "the preliminary injunction really doesn't accomplish anything" because OCR doesn't enforce "guidance." That same staffer noted Lhamon was "persuaded" not to put her directive in writing, a recurring theme throughout the investigation's findings.
The supplemental report describes a pattern of pressure directed at regional staff who tried to follow the law. A newly interviewed staffer told investigators that Lhamon threatened both his job and Mattson's if they didn't comply with her directives. When Kansas City staff tried to balance their legal obligations with OCR's instructions, leadership transferred their cases to "more compliant" offices in Chicago and Seattle, a move a deputy assistant secretary called "extremely unusual."
In a virtual meeting two years after the injunction, OCR leadership disclosed a "one-week pause on all SOGI cases across all 50 states" in preparation for new guidance from Lhamon. An official at that meeting said "headquarters is trying to minimize communications in writing because this is just more stuff for discovery."
That line alone tells you everything about the mindset inside the building. These weren't officials wrestling with a close legal question. They were officials who knew they were on the wrong side of a court order and didn't want a paper trail proving it.
The pattern of retaliation against government whistleblowers who report misconduct is disturbingly familiar across Democratic-led agencies.
One of the most striking details in the report involves a memo from the Kansas City regional director, a document the initial Biden-era investigation "inexplicably" left out entirely, without even a single reference.
That memo included "very specific instructions from Assistant Secretary Lhamon and Enforcement Director [redacted] on how to proceed with opening and investigating SOGI matters despite the clear impact of the Injunction." Days after the court order, Lhamon speculated that only she and "senior staff" could face legal trouble for continuing the investigations. But if "field staff" were found in contempt and fined, she offered to pay their legal representation and fines "either through the department or by her personally."
Think about what that means. A senior federal official told subordinates to defy a federal judge, and offered to cover the consequences out of her own pocket if they got caught.
The supplemental report doesn't just substantiate Mattson's claims. It takes apart the Biden administration's initial response to OSC as unthorough, evasive, and misleading.
The department failed to "more accurately assess readily available materials, conduct additional interviews, and forthrightly respond" to Mattson's core allegation. Investigators never interviewed key personnel in the Chicago, Atlanta, and Cleveland regional offices, all subject to the injunction. The supplemental report found that the initial report "omitted material information" Mattson had supplied, including the Kansas City regional director's detailed memo.
The Biden-era report also appeared to pull a bait-and-switch. Rather than address compliance with Judge Atchley's order, it pointed to the Justice Department's "notice of compliance" in the broader litigation, suggesting that in "the weeks, months, and years" after the injunction, OCR could keep pursuing gender identity enforcement in plaintiff states.
Months after the court order, Lhamon formalized a workaround: OCR would "simply not use those particular guidance documents" for SOGI investigations but would "continue to carry out its statutorily required responsibilities" without relying on the enjoined documents "in determining what the statute and regulations mean." In practice, the department continued enforcing the same interpretation of Title IX the court had blocked, just without citing the specific documents the judge named.
The supplemental report concluded there is "reason to believe" OCR leadership "created a path for carrying out its preferred SOGI policies" in states subject to the injunction, using "precisely" the gender identity interpretation of Title IX that the court had enjoined.
A year and a half after the injunction, Mattson notified OSC that Lhamon may have violated the order by investigating Oklahoma's Owasso Public Schools following the suicide of nonbinary student Nex Benedict, citing "gender identity" as a basis for enforcement. He also reported that Lhamon "threatened adverse personnel actions" against him for refusing what he considered an illegal order.
Mattson didn't seek the spotlight. In a video discussion with Empower Oversight, the whistleblower advocacy group representing him, he said Wednesday: "I did not set out to be a whistleblower, but as Edmund Burke said, the only thing that's required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
He added that he would testify "either in court or before Congress if I'm called to do that."
Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt said the Biden administration flouted the injunction by "forcing their gender ideology views on local school districts, and in many cases by bullying them into consent decrees or other agreements when those local school districts were under threat of investigation by the federal government." The group had pressed the Trump administration last fall and again this winter for updates on the probe of its predecessor.
Empower senior counsel Bobby Cheren told Just the News that OSC's recommendation for punishments, up to and including removals, are "as close to calling for firings as you're going to see from the OSC."
Lhamon, for her part, landed at the University of California Berkeley law school after the Biden administration ended. The school has been promoting an Associated Press interview in which she describes the Trump administration's high-profile higher education investigations as "performance art."
Berkeley did not respond to queries Wednesday about the supplemental report's characterization of Lhamon, who leads its Edley Center on Law & Democracy.
The contrast is hard to miss. A federal investigation found reason to believe Lhamon directed subordinates to defy a court order, threatened their jobs when they resisted, and tried to avoid creating a written record of the scheme. Now she lectures about democratic norms from an endowed perch at a prestigious law school.
OSC's chief counsel, Charles Baldis, told Trump in a four-page letter that the agency "reviewed the disclosure, agency reports, and whistleblower comments" and "determined that the reports contain the information required by statute and that the findings appear reasonable."
The findings raise serious questions about whether Democratic officials facing mounting accountability will continue to enjoy the institutional protection they've grown accustomed to, or whether the consequences are finally catching up.
The report's recommendations include sanctions up to and including removal for current and former officials. Whether the Trump administration follows through will test its stated commitment to restoring accountability across the federal bureaucracy.
Congress may also weigh in. Mattson has offered to testify, and the documented pattern, defying a court order, threatening subordinates, hiding communications from discovery, and then burying the evidence during a friendly administration's investigation, is the kind of conduct that committee chairmen build hearings around.
The broader lesson extends well beyond Title IX. When political actors treat legal constraints as obstacles to route around rather than boundaries to respect, the entire system of self-governance weakens. The Biden OCR didn't just disagree with a judge's ruling. It built an internal apparatus to circumvent it while pressuring the people closest to the facts to stay quiet.
Timothy Mattson didn't stay quiet. The investigation says he was right not to.
Courts exist to settle disputes. When the losing side treats the ruling as a suggestion and punishes the employees who notice, the problem isn't a policy disagreement, it's contempt for the rule of law itself.
