Lawyers For Harvard In Trump Administration Dispute Are No Strangers To High-profile Legal Matters

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."