“HOYAGATE” – Will Georgetown President Have to Testify?

Rocked in recent weeks by allegations in investigative reports uncovering rampant partisan “lawfare,” plans for election interference, and the breeding of anti-Trump fanaticism, Georgetown University now faces possible congressional hearings following a letter from House Oversight Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-TX) ordering several faculty members to preserve documents related to the potential misuse of university resources.

Such hearings could put university President John J. DeGioia, who has led the school’s sharp move to the left, directly under the spotlight, drawing the kind of publicity that attended the infamous hearings last December exposing the antisemitism running rampant on the campuses of elite universities. This time, however, the issue will be Georgetown’s tax-exempt status and the fact that the school accepts hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars even as its faculty commit apparent election interference and are major players in the lawfare against Trump.

In two extraordinarily well-researched pieces published in March, Deroy Murdock for The American Spectator and Neil McCabe for RedState delve into how Georgetown sacrificed its academic standards in pursuit of left-wing political goals. Their exposés follow additional reporting from “Twitter Files” author Matt Taibbi earlier this year which likewise uncovers how the university has collapsed into angry partisanship instead of an institution of higher learning.

As Murdock, McCabe, and Taibbi all detail, Georgetown has become a haven for the most extreme anti-Trump activists, including individuals who have been entirely disgraced and even may have broken the law.

Perhaps the most infamous is Peter Strzok, the former Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI who was a major player in the Russiagate hoax. Strzok was the subject of an Inspector General report that detailed his anger toward Trump and exposed his efforts to label Trump a Russian agent despite knowing there was no truth to the claims. Strzok now works as an adjunct professor in Georgetown’s foreign service school in an apparent reward for his efforts.

Just as astonishingly, Georgetown has also hired former Obama chief of staff and Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. We now know that Podesta was another key figure in Russiagate, and that even as his boss Hillary Clinton was giving her concession speech in 2016 and urging people to give Trump a “chance to govern,” Podesta was working to overturn the election and push the narrative that Trump was in the pocket of Vladimir Putin.

Taken in culmination, the recent revelations create a stunning picture of how Georgetown now appears to have descended like Harvard and Yale into the worst sort of ugly and malicious hate-peddling political activism – seriously undermining the school’s Catholic identity in the process.

Just a few decades ago, Georgetown was renowned as the home of leading Catholic intellectuals, including names like James Schall, a prominent Jesuit writer and thinker, and foreign policy lights such as Anthony Bouscaren, Lev Dobriansky, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. Now, however, rather than these great thought leaders who exposed Soviet totalitarianism and rallied people to the defense of freedom, Georgetown has courted all the sons and daughters of the radical leftism that is tearing the United States apart.

Murdock’s scathing indictment of the university is particularly telling, as he is himself a graduate of the school. But as he describes in his March 17 column, Georgetown, and in particular Georgetown Law, has now become the “Vatican of Trump hatred” – something which should call the school’s tax-exempt status into question.

“The relentless lawsuits and other efforts to ‘get Trump’ too often lead back to my alma mater,” Murdock writes. “This cabal’s intensely partisan actions at a non-profit university raise questions about Georgetown’s qualifications to receive federal grants and remain tax-exempt.”

In total, Georgetown has received a jaw-dropping $970 million from American taxpayers over just the past six years – all while its faculty were displaying blatant partisanship and working to undermine Donald Trump.

As McCabe reported on March 23, Rep. Sessions recently sent a preservation letter to one of those faculty members, Georgetown Law School Associate Dean Rosa Brooks.

Brooks, a senior advisor in the Obama administration, was a key member of a group called the “Transition Integrity Project” (TIP), a collection of liberal elites from throughout government and academia who thought up ways to prevent Trump from being re-elected in 2020 and war-gamed how they might prevent him from taking office if he were to win four years ago.

Notably, just a few weeks into Trump’s first term in 2017, Foreign Policy magazine published a piece from Brooks in which she openly speculated about “three ways to get rid of Trump” – including a military coup d’état.

As McCabe describes, TIP was funded in part by groups linked to liberal megadonor George Soros. Now, Rep. Sessions is asking Brooks for materials related to TIP, writing that he is “particularly concerned by the activities of TIP, and any similar endeavor in advance of the 2024 election, because this exercise seems to have been administered adjacent to the Georgetown University Law School.”

Matt Taibbi has also reported extensively on the links between Georgetown faculty and TIP. While TIP participants allege that their plotting was just a series of thought experiments, Taibbi notes an eerie similarity between their theorizing about how Trump might seek to “undermine democracy” and actual actions Trump’s opponents have been taking against him over the past eight years.

For instance, months before January 6, 2021, one TIP simulation predicted that Trump “would contrive to label Biden supporters guilty of ‘insurrection’” following hypothetical left-wing protests after a clear 2020 Trump victory.

As Taibbi wrote, quoting Michael Brendan Daugherty in National Review, the TIP report and TIP participants’ activities in the early months of the 2020 campaign give off the unavoidable impression that “some progressives are steeling themselves for a Color Revolution in the United States,” because winning a normal election “just isn’t cathartic enough.”

If that was indeed the case, it seems Georgetown allowed itself to become home base for plotting that revolution. The links between the school and the individuals leading the “resistance” against Trump are numerous.

And now, according to Taibbi, they are apparently back at it again, preparing for a possible Trump victory. At least some of that preparation, it appears, may be taking place within the confines of Georgetown.

Mary McCord, who told NBC News in January that she is “already starting to put together a team to think through the most damaging types of things that he [Trump] might do so that we’re ready to bring lawsuits” – an endeavor that sounds suspiciously similar to the TIP – is a visiting professor at Georgetown Law School. As Murdock relayed, McCord “submitted the original false FISA application to the court using the demonstrably false Dossier,” placing her at the center of the Russiagate hoax.

Former DNC Chair and TIP participant Donna Brazile is also a professor and lecturer in Georgetown’s Women’s Studies Department.

Jennifer Granholm, the former Governor of Michigan and current Secretary of Energy, joined the board of Georgetown Law’s “Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection” in 2019 – just a few months before becoming involved with TIP.

With a pivotal election coming up in November, Americans deserve to know what role exactly Georgetown is playing in trying to influence the outcome of the current race. That could put Georgetown’s President DeGioia squarely under the microscope if House Republicans decide to more closely look into this matter – as McCabe’s reporting suggests they already are.

Specifically, the House Education Committee could haul DeGioia in for questioning to ask what he knows about apparent plots by his own faculty members to stop Trump from taking office. Republicans could then press for more answers on what exactly these individuals are teaching Georgetown students – many of whom will likely go on to occupy prominent posts in the government.

Georgetown could also lose its tax-exempt status, something that would be a major warning for other leading universities to rein in their political activism.

As the questioning of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and M.I.T. late last year showed, transparency is often the most powerful tool in swaying public opinion. At the very least, transparency is what the American people deserve when it comes to potential efforts to undermine democracy.

B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with previous experience in the legislative and executive branches.