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Trump says he wants 'names and countries' of all international students at Harvard
(eu.usatoday.com)
cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5033822
He made the request in a Truth Social post May 25, days after a federal judge blocked the Trump administration's effort to bar the university from enrolling anyone in the United States on a student visa.
"We want to know who those foreign students are, a reasonable request since we give Harvard BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, but Harvard isn’t exactly forthcoming," Trump wrote. "We want those names and countries."
I don't think he wants to dox them. I don't think he cares enough for that. He just wants someone for the public to hate, and in this case it's the foreign students
why do you think it can be one or the other, but not both?
He already could dox them if he wanted to, all that information is already accessible to him. He needs to make it seem like someone's fighting him on it when nobody really is.
Interesting question actually... for sure the SEVIS records already have what the President wants to expose, but would he personally be able to see these records? I think we know, for example, that when Biden was President, he wasn't able to view or release his predecessor's tax return even though the IRS has it.
I don't know how those IRS protections compare with the SEVIS ones (and would find it plausible if it turns out the IRS is the one with the stronger ones), but I'd certainly be interested in learning more about it either way.
Agreed, this makes sense and is the most likely answer. The other aspect though is even if he could get the records from SEVIS, doxxing from that (likely in violation of laws and pre-existing regulations) would be a serious thing. Now, openly doxxing from Harvard's own report would likely also create legal issues - but from a practical standpoint there might be fewer controls on drumpf and his underlings in releasing this info if it was successfully obtained in this way. On the other hand I feel like this is giving drumpf too much credit, he's made far dumber gaffes before.
One final thing. Of course, there's slightly more plausible deniability here ("oh no some jilted employee at Harvard must have posted the copy of the report after Harvard was forced to write it and send it to us, we didn't do it"). All the more reason for Harvard to resist any such demands to the very ends of the Earth...