Whistleblower vindicated: Biden officials invented loophole to impose gender identity, flout court

High-ranking Biden administration officials conspired to violate a 2022 court order against their interpretation of Title IX as covering "gender identity" within the definition of "sex," and may have also tried to conceal those efforts through coercion and intimidation, according to a Department of Education report made public Wednesday after lengthy outside review.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel told President Trump the department "fully substantiated the allegations" by whistleblower Timothy Mattson, who now leads the department's Office for Civil Rights' regional office in Kansas City, recommending sanctions against current and former officials and compensation for Mattson for the risk he took coming forward.

"OSC has 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 agency's chief counsel, Charles Baldis, told Trump in a four-page letter. 

The Feb. 19 "supplemental" report, compelled by the Trump administration's OSC after President Biden's OSC dismissed Mattson's allegations a month before the presidential transition, repeatedly names then-OCR Director Catherine Lhamon as the key figure directing Mattson and others to continue enforcing the gender-identity guidance.

"OCR’s leadership actively engaged in efforts to thwart at least one OCR regional office (Region VII) [Kansas City] from following the plain and unambiguous meaning of the order" by U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley, a Trump nominee, who blocked enforcement of the guidance in the states that sued the feds, the supplemental report says.

The order validated years of accusations that Lhamon's office, which she led in the Obama and Biden administrations as assistant secretary for civil rights, misrepresented nonbinding guidance as legally binding, threatening federal funding for K-12 schools and colleges that didn't bend the knee.

Days after Atchley's order, in a virtual meeting with Mattson, Lhamon "stated that she planned to disregard the advice provided by" her own general counsel and the Justice Department "in navigating OCR’s response to the Injunction." (Biden's OSC claimed Mattson "misunderstands the scope of the Court’s injunction.")

A year and a half later, Mattson notified OSC that Lhamon may have violated the injunction by investigating Oklahoma's Owasso Public Schools following the suicide of nonbinary student Nex Benedict – citing "gender identity" as a basis for enforcement – and that she "threatened adverse personnel actions" against him for refusing an illegal order.

The report redacts Mattson's name in every instance, but the identifiers make clear it's him. Empower Oversight, the whistleblower advocacy group that represents him, discussed the case with Mattson in a video Wednesday, identifying him as the whistleblower.

Empower scolded the Trump administration last fall and again this winter for giving no update on its probe of its predecessor. OSC had asked the department in February 2025 for a supplemental report to answer Mattson's critical response to the initial report.

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," Empower President Tristan Leavitt said Wednesday.

"I will testify either in court or before Congress if I'm called to do that," Mattson said. "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."

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."

Mattson's old boss Lhamon joined the University of California Berkeley law school when the Biden administration ended. The school is touting her Associated Press interview about the decline of the Trump administration's "performance art," as Lhamon describes its high-profile higher education investigations.

The law school didn't answer queries Wednesday for its response to the supplemental report's characterization of Lhamon, who leads its Edley Center on Law & Democracy.

Lhamon allegedly claimed 'preliminary injunction really doesn't accomplish anything' 

The supplemental report characterizes its predecessor's investigation of Mattson's allegations, at least in part, as unthorough, evasive and misleading.

Biden's Department of Education failed to "more accurately assess readily available materials, conduct additional interviews, and forthrightly respond" to Mattson's "core allegation" about Lhamon's OCR "deliberately" flouting the injunction, it says.

"It appears that the WB’s assertions are accurate" on the first three questions Trump's OSC posed to the department.

The department apparently didn't interview "key personnel" prior to its initial response to OSC in December 2024, including anyone in the Chicago, Atlanta and Cleveland OCR regional offices, all subject to Atchley's injunction. A newly interviewed staffer told the general counsel's office that Lhamon threatened his and Mattson's jobs if they didn't comply with her.

Another redacted staffer recalled a virtual meeting with Lhamon in which she said, paraphrased, "the preliminary injunction really doesn't accomplish anything" because OCR doesn't enforce "guidance," and that she was "persuaded" not to put her directive in writing.

"The record indicates that Assistant Secretary Lhamon had, at this point, made clear her evolving intent to defy the court's order and had begun the process of forcing her OCR subordinates to adopt her posture – and to do so without creating a written record in opposition to or further legal consideration of that effort," the report says.

"Corrective action continued to be proposed in additional cases identified by" Mattson despite the injunction prohibiting such enforcement in those states, which the initial report didn't disclose, the supplemental report said. 

When Kansas City staff tried to balance their legal obligations with OCR's directives, the latter transferred their cases to "more compliant" offices in Chicago and Seattle, which a deputy assistant secretary called "extremely unusual." 

'Headquarters is trying to minimize communications in writing'

The supplemental report confirmed Mattson's allegation that the initial report "omitted material information" he supplied, "including a highly detailed Memorandum" the Kansas City regional director gave the department's general counsel in response to OSC.

That memo "included recitations of very specific instructions from Assistant Secretary Lhamon and Enforcement Director [redacted] on how to proceed with opening and investigating SOGI [sexual orientation and gender identity] matters despite the clear impact of the Injunction," yet it was "inexplicably" left out, without even a single reference.

Lhamon speculated days after the injunction that only she and "senior staff" could get in legal trouble for continuing SOGI investigations, but if "field staff" were found in contempt of court and fined, "she is offering to pay our legal representation and to pay any fines for us, either through the department or by her personally," the memo said.

In a virtual meeting two years later, "OCR leadership appears to have repeated similar instructions," disclosing a "one-week pause on all SOGI cases across all 50 states" in preparation for new guidance from Lhamon. An official "indicated headquarters is trying to minimize communications in writing because this is just more stuff for [legal] discovery."

The brunt of the fault is assigned in the department's response to OSC's open-ended question to provide "any additional responsive information." 

The 2024 report appeared to pull a bait-and-switch, saying the department was complying with the Justice Department's "notice of compliance" in the ongoing litigation against the Title IX guidance rather than Atchley's order itself, so in "the weeks, months, and years" after it could keep pursuing SOGI matters in plaintiff staffs, the supplemental report says.

It also reiterated "Lhamon's attack" on Atchley's order, affirmed by an appeals court. The supplemental report questions why its predecessor would keep trying to "undermine the validity of the Injunction" since it claimed the injunction simply prohibited use of "the particular June 2021 guidance documents" in its SOGI enforcement.

Months after Atchley's order, Lhamon formalized that "OCR would simply not use those particular guidance documents" for SOGI investigations. "OCR will continue to carry out its statutorily required responsibilities" but won't rely on the enjoined documents "in determining what the statute and regulations mean."

Based on the department's review, including "additional interviews and materials not cited" in the initial report, "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 forbidden by Atchley, the supplemental report says.