In July 2022, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Biden administration from reinterpreting Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation as protected categories. Twenty states had sued. The judge said stop. On July 26, 2022 — days after that injunction landed — Catherine Lhamon, then-Assistant Secretary for the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, held a virtual meeting with OCR attorneys and pressured them to keep investigating Title IX complaints under the blocked policy anyway.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel just called that "fully substantiated."
On June 9, 2026, OSC Chief Counsel Charles Baldis sent a letter to President Trump confirming that a whistleblower complaint filed by Timothy Mattson — the Regional Office of Civil Rights director in Kansas City — checked out on every count. The full investigative report dropped the next day, June 10. Mattson had filed the complaint in April 2024 after watching Lhamon's office steamroll the injunction from the inside. It went public in October 2024. Lhamon quietly left office in January 2025.
The report details how OCR regional offices in Kansas City, Chicago, and Seattle continued processing gender-identity-based complaints as if the court order didn't exist. One case involved an Alaska school district that had banned male athletes identifying as female from competing in girls' sports. Under the injunction, OCR had no authority to pursue it. They pursued it.
Department of Education spokesperson Amelia Joy didn't mince words. She said the findings revealed a "complete disregard for Title IX" and a "radical gender identity agenda through what appears to be coercion." Joy emphasized that the "clear statutory purpose of Title IX" is "to protect the rights of women and girls" and confirmed the Department is "taking remedial actions to correct any abuses."
Tristan Leavitt, president of the government watchdog group Empower Oversight, called the findings "more than enough to warrant accountability" and pushed for "meaningful change to make sure this never happens again."
Lhamon, for her part, landed softly. She's now the inaugural director of UC Berkeley Law's Edley Center on Law and Democracy. When the report dropped, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky called the allegations "unsubstantiated" and said the findings didn't change the law school's "confidence in her." This, about a report the Office of Special Counsel explicitly labeled "fully substantiated." Chemerinsky either didn't read it or doesn't care what the words mean.
Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri — who, as Missouri's Attorney General, was one of the officials behind the original lawsuit that produced the injunction — has been tracking the case since Mattson's complaint surfaced. The pattern here isn't complicated: a political appointee got a court order she didn't like, ignored it, pressured career staff to ignore it too, and left before the bill came due.
The College Fix, which has covered the case extensively, noted that the substantiation covers not just Lhamon's direct actions but the institutional culture she created — one where career employees understood that the injunction was to be treated as an inconvenience, not a legal boundary.
A court told them no. They said yes. The whistleblower wrote it down. And the person responsible is now teaching law at Berkeley.
That's not irony. That's a résumé bullet point.