Ibrahim Bharmal will use the money to spend a year ‘serving the public interest’ at CAIR’s California chapter
The Harvard Law Review is awarding a $65,000 fellowship meant to serve “the public interest” to Ibrahim Bharmal, the Harvard Law School student who faced criminal charges for assaulting an Israeli classmate, according to a new report.
Bharmal is one of this year’s recipients of the Harvard Law Review Fellowship, Ira Stoll of The Editors reported. The program supports “recent Harvard Law School graduates”—Bharmal is set to graduate this month—with “a demonstrated interest in serving the public interest through their work and scholarship.” It comes with a $65,000 stipend that funds each fellow’s work “in a public-interest related role at a government agency or nonprofit organization.” For Bharmal, that work will come at the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Los Angeles office, according to Stoll.
The move comes at a tumultuous time for both the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Law School. The Trump administration is probing both entities over internal documents, first reported in the Washington Free Beacon, that show editors at Harvard Law Review use race to select both editors and articles for publication. At least one private attorney, former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, plans to sue the journal over the practice, ordering its editors on Friday to preserve documents that he plans to subpoena.
The law review claims to be separate from the law school, something a spokesman for Harvard, Jeff Neal, emphasized in a statement to the Free Beacon. The fellowship could undercut those claims. A Free Beacon review found that Harvard’s database for grant and fellowship opportunities, known as CARAT, advertises the fellowship. That advertisement states that a “committee of Harvard Law School and Harvard Law Review alumni in public interest careers chooses finalists from the set of applicants, and a faculty committee interviews the finalists to select fellows,” indicating Harvard faculty members signed off on Bharmal as a recipient.
Harvard Law School did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bharmal, himself a Harvard Law Review editor, attracted the attention of the Trump administration even before it launched the investigations into the prestigious law journal.
In its April 11 letter to Harvard outlining the policy demands necessary to “maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government,” the Trump administration called on the Ivy League institution to permanently expel “the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student,” a reference to Bharmal and his fellow defendant, divinity school graduate student Elom Tettey-Tamaklo.
On that day, in 2023, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were shown shoving and accosting their Israeli classmate in a video first reported by the Free Beacon. Keffiyeh-clad individuals, who assembled outside of the business school as part of a “die-in” protest condemning Israel’s days-old retaliatory war on Hamas, surrounded the Israeli student, as he attempted to walk through the crowd. They repeatedly shouted “SHAME!”
Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged with misdemeanor assault months later, in May 2024, one year before their expected graduation dates. As their assault case progressed, both students remained in good standing with Harvard, which did not say whether it would award them degrees if they were convicted or if their proceedings remained active.
Both Harvard Law School and the Harvard Law Review, meanwhile, stood by Bharmal throughout his court appearances.
Last month, on April 10, Harvard Law School published a blog post in which Bharmal fondly reminisced on his time at the “Crimmigration Clinic,” a law school course in which students work on federal immigration cases. Two weeks later, the Harvard Law Review published an anonymous “blog essay” titled, “The Immigrant Rights Resistance Lives.” Bharmal is the author, internal messages obtained by the Free Beacon show.
Bharmal appeared in a Boston court on Monday, five days after publishing that “blog essay.” There, a Suffolk County judge ordered him and Tettey-Tamaklo to perform 80 hours of community service and take an in-person anger management class as part of a pretrial diversion program that will bring an end to the case.
More students may have been charged in relation to the “die-in” protest if not for Harvard. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office asked the university to assist in a follow-up investigation aimed at helping “to identify any additional perpetrators,” the Free Beacon reported. Harvard refused, according to the office. Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight called the school’s behavior “a shock to the Commonwealth.”
Should Bharmal complete the pretrial diversion program—he is due in court on July 25 to update the judge—his record will not contain a criminal conviction. Still, that likely wouldn’t have jeopardized his impending job at CAIR: The group recently sued Columbia University to stop the school from complying with federal records related to anti-Semitic protests, and its leader said he was “happy to see” Gazans “break the siege” during Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
Update 7:05 p.m.: This piece has been updated with additional information.
This article was originally published at freebeacon.com
