WASHINGTON (AP) — The two attorneys representing Harvard University in a pitched fight with the Trump administration are no strangers to the spotlight or to Washington investigations that reach into the White House.
One of them, Robert Hur, was a senior Justice Department official during President Donald Trump’s first term and served for a time as the top federal prosecutor in Maryland. But he’s perhaps best known as the special counsel who investigated President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information and produced a report that painted a damaging assessment of Biden’s mental acuity months before the Democrat dropped his bid for reelection.
The other, William Burck, has been a go-to attorney for Washington legal crises dating back years. A former lawyer in President George W. Bush’s White House, he represented multiple Trump associates during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and has more recently defended New York Mayor Eric Adams in a corruption case that was brought, and later dropped, by the Justice Department.
The involvement of the lawyers — both well-known in conservative legal circles and both selected in the past for prominent Trump orbit positions — is an interesting wrinkle to a hugely consequential dispute between the federal government and the country’s oldest and wealthiest university. The clash is shaping up to be a seminal moment in Trump’s ongoing efforts to bend elite universities to his will by threatening to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding if they don’t agree to major campus reforms.
“It’s a wise move on Harvard’s part” to pick the pair, said Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “They’re looking for people that the administration won’t dismiss as leftists.”
A look at the lawyers and the issues at stake:
Who is Robert Hur?
The son of Korean immigrants and a Harvard alumnus himself, Hur has spoken openly about his desire to give back to the country that took in his family decades ago.
He spent years as a federal prosecutor in Maryland before being selected as the Justice Department’s principal associate deputy attorney general — one of the agency’s most powerful positions — early in the first Trump administration and even spoke from the White House podium in 2017 about efforts to counter gang violence. He was later unanimously confirmed by the Senate for the role of U.S. attorney in Maryland.
“Rob proved himself to be extremely competent, affable and a straight arrow — and an exceptionally good litigator,” said Harvey Eisenberg, a former federal prosecutor in Baltimore who worked with Hur. “He’s just a professional.”
In January 2023, he was selected by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to serve as special counsel and investigate whether Biden mishandled classified materials that he took with him after serving as vice president.
Hur pledged at the time of the appointment to conduct the investigation fairly and with “dispassionate judgment.” His conservative bona fides — besides his Trump administration service, he also clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist at the Supreme Court — were meant to signal to the public that it could trust the outcome of the investigation because it was in the hands of an outside prosecutor who would not protect the president for political purposes.
His final report a year later faulted Biden for his retention of classified material but decided criminal charges weren’t warranted. One of Hur’s more memorable conclusions was that it would be hard to prove to a jury that Biden possessed the required criminal intent because he would likely present himself as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Republicans seized on that language to raise questions about Biden’s ability to lead the country for a second term, while Biden and his advisers accused Hur of straying beyond his mandate and reaching an unjustified assessment. Hur has defended his investigation as independent and rigorous and said he needed to explain Biden’s state-of-mind to show how he arrived at his decision to not charge.
Hur has since returned to private practice and is a partner in the law firm of King & Spalding.
Who is William Burck?
Burck has long been one of the most prominent attorneys in Washington, with a track record of participating in a litany of politically complicated and high-profile matters.
A former federal prosecutor who was part of the Justice Department’s trial team in the Martha Stewart case, Burck was also a top lawyer in the Bush White House and advised the president on legal matters.
“Bill was always a straight shooter,” said Roosevelt, who was a Supreme Court clerk at the same time as Burck. “He was honest, dependable, honorable and a very good lawyer.”
Years later, as Mueller investigated whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election, Burck represented a stable of Trump associates, including adviser Steve Bannon, then-White House counsel Don McGahn and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff at the time. All were witnesses in the investigation; none was charged.
He also played a role in the 2018 confirmation process of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, when he was responsible for culling documents for the Senate from Kavanaugh’s White House years. Some Democrats accused Republicans of cherry-picking the documents they made available and called Burck conflicted because of his representation of Trump-world figures, an assertion he brushed off when he told The Associated Press at the time: “I think partisanship may be getting in the way of rational thought.”
Burck also represented New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft against accusations that he paid for massage parlor sex acts — Florida prosecutors later dismissed the case — and was part of the defense team for Adams as Justice Department prosecutors in the Trump administration moved to throw out the prosecution.
In January, the Trump Organization announced that it was hiring Burck, a managing partner of Quinn Emanuel LLP, to vet deals that could pose conflicts with public policy. He also represented the Paul Weiss law firm when it reached a settlement last month with the Trump White House that resulted in an earlier executive order against it being rescinded.
What is the Harvard dispute about?
The federal government said this week that it was freezing more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts to Harvard, the seventh time the Trump administration has taken such a step at one of the nation’s most elite colleges.
It’s part of a broader effort to force compliance with the administration’s political agenda, as well as to influence campus policy and limit student activism.
In a letter dated Monday, Hur and Burck argued that Harvard had already made “lasting and robust structural, policy, and programmatic changes to ensure that the university is a welcoming and supportive learning environment for all students.” But it said Harvard would not accede to the administration’s demands, which include broad government and leadership reforms, in order to preserve its funding.
“The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government,” the lawyers wrote. “Accordingly, Harvard will not accept the government’s terms as an agreement in principle.”
Harvard President Alan Garber struck a similar note, saying that the government could not dictate what universities teach and whom they admit or hire.
