DOJ Civil Rights Division hire resigned from Alabama firm over Facebook post following George Floyd's murder

Daniel Flickinger was one of the DOJ lawyers who sued Harvard on Friday. As recently as last June, he was still fighting in court over the fallout from the 2020 Facebook post.

On Friday morning, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Harvard University, alleging that the university’s actions relating to Jewish and Israeli students violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Harvard Crimson provided coverage from campus, and The New York Times also covered the lawsuit — the Trump administration’s latest attack on Harvard — but, focused as Law Dork has been on DOJ’s degradation, the signatories of the lawsuit seemed worth checking out.

One of the signatories — Daniel Flickinger — was still engaged in the summer of 2025 in a five-year-old dispute relating to a “hypothetical” he posed in a post on his personal Facebook page in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 murder musing about whether “a seven-time felon“ would “choose to die in a fentanyl and methamphetamine numbed strangulation“ if it would lead to “being worshipped in a nationwide funeral and my family receiving millions of dollars.“

Flickinger concluded the June 2020 post: “Purely hypothetical.”

The Alabama Supreme Court concluded the post was “apparently” about Floyd.

On Friday, Flickinger was listed as “senior counsel” in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Not hypothetical.

Nearly everyone on the Harvard lawsuit is either a political appointee or a new hire since Attorney General Pam Bondi and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division head, took over.

This is, in part, because most of the longtime Civil Rights Division lawyers left the division during Dhillon’s first year in office. As Bloomberg Law’s Suzanne Monyak and Ben Penn reported in August 2025, “Out of roughly 400 division attorneys at the start of the Trump administration, about 300 have left this year, Dhillon said on a Breitbart News podcast Aug. 17.“

Jesus Osete is a political appointee, and Jeffrey Morrison, while a career lawyer, moved into a political appointee leadership position after opposing a unionization effort within DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

All of the other lawyers are new to government. After more than a decade in commercial litigation in Utah, John Mertens joined DOJ in September 2025 as a trial attorney. By February, he was acting chief of the Civil Rights Division’s Educational Opportunities Section. Adam Griffin spent almost two years at the Pacific Legal Foundation and Joshua Zuckerman spent four years at Gibson Dunn before both joined DOJ in August 2025 as trial attorneys.

Then there is Flickinger.

As of Friday, as noted, he was “senior counsel“ in DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

As of June 2025, however, he was litigating pro se — as his own lawyer — in the Alabama Supreme Court over the long-running “weird” lawsuit about the personal Facebook post he wrote in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

From the August 2025 Alabama Supreme Court opinion, quoting an earlier April 2023 Alabama Supreme Court decision, the court explained what started it all:

The post was then re-posted on a Facebook page that connected Flickinger to his then-employer in which the account “digitally merged … social-media posts appropriated from his personal social-media platforms,” per the Alabama Supreme Court’s description of Flickinger’s claims. Flickinger was confronted about his posts at the firm, where he had worked for the past 11 years, and he was given the option to resign or face “other [more punitive] options.“ He resigned and then sued the person who had shared the posts with members of his firm, as well as that person’s firm.

After going up and down through the Alabama courts, as of August 2025, a claim of tortious interference with a business relationship remained against the person who shared what Flickinger referred to as the “counterfeit” page. The lawsuit, however interesting as a legal matter, is not particularly relevant here beyond establishing that “[i]t is undisputed,” per the Alabama Supreme Court, that Flickinger authored the original post on his personal Facebook page and resigned soon thereafter from the law firm where he had worked for most if not all of his legal career.

And now, he works for DOJ’s Civil Rights Divsion.

Asked about the hire of Flickinger and Alabama litigation, Wyn Horbuckle responded, “The department declines to comment.” Emails were sent to accounts associated with Flickinger with requests for comment and a message left at a number previously associated with him that still says it belongs to “Daniel” on the voice mail message, but no response was received.

After leaving that job, in addition to the long-running lawsuit related to his resignation, Flickinger did appear in at least one other case of note.

In late September 2021, Flickinger teamed up with David Foley, a regional attorney with the National Labor Relations Board at the time, to sue then-president Joe Biden over Covid vaccine requirements for federal employees.

The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor — a far-right judge known for ruling accordingly who was a George W. Bush appointee — and even he had to deny their motion for a preliminary injunction because, as O’Connor wrote in his October 2021 order, “Courts have repeatedly held that the judicial branch lacks the jurisdiction to enjoin the President of the United States. … Thus, the Court cannot remedy Plaintiff’s alleged injury because the Court has no declaratory or injunctive power against President Biden.“

For this reason, lawsuits seeking injunctive relief generally name the relevant agency or official responsible for carrying out whatever action is the subject of the lawsuit. Although the duo attempted to add parties to their complaint, DOJ lawyers explained why that request was “procedurally deficient,“ prompting a second attempt from the duo in mid-November. Eventually, however, another case ended up being the primary case to consider such challenges within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, although Flickinger remained on Foley’s lingering case at the district court up to the final filing in July 2022.

Throughout the litigation, Flickinger’s signature on filings was not listed as being affiliated with any firm and his address was listed as a Post Office box.