Robert Hur Represents Harvard in Existential Clash with White House
By Tom Kagy | 17 Apr, 2025

A Korean American lawyer with impeccable conservative credentials will lead Harvard's fight against Trump's demand to quash free speech and violate the rights of foreign students.

Earlier this week Harvard University hired Robert Kyoung Hur as one of two attorneys who will strategize a legal response to Trump's efforts to withhold $9 billion in federal funding as leverage to force the nation's oldest and richest university to submit to his vision of a totalitarian America.

No American attorney has credentials that trump Hur's for representing Harvard in its response to this gross presidential overreach.  

In addition to being a Harvard grad, Hur clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist before serving as a high-level special counsel in George Bush's Justice Department.  He was Trump's nominee as US Attorney for the District of Maryland from which he resigned in February 2021 as Trump's term ended.  Hur's highest-profile gig was being selected in 2023 as Special Counsel to investigate Joe Biden's alleged violation of regulations pertaining to classified documents while serving as President Obama's vice president.

Robert Hur's Harvard retainer comes at a surreal pass in the history of the United States, a nation that had for a century been the light of the world.  That light flickered and dimmed alarmingly when it appeared that Trump had meant his campaign pledge to tear up the Constitution in order to advance the MAGA agenda.  

Uppermost on that agenda is ridding the US of "dangerous" and "criminal" migrants.  Ranking 22nd among US universities for attracting international applicants, Harvard hosts about 10,000 foreign students at any given time.  Most of these students either pay full tuition, unlike most American students, or are top scholars and researchers who are invaluable to US scientific research.

One of the demands made by the Trump administration to Harvard and other elite universities is to turn over the records of all foreign students to be scrutinized for hints of illegality, violence or participation in protests.  

To comply would make Harvard a party not only to violating its students' privacy rights but also possibly subjecting them to deportation like Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist and legal resident married to a US citizen.  Another Columbia student targeted by DHS for deportation is Mohsen Mahdawi, also a Palestinian student activist who had been a legal US resident for a decade.

The other demand made by Trump was to ban all campus protest activities in direct violation of the constitutional right of free speech and association, generally considered the most inviolable of the rights enumerated in the Constitution.  That right has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as protecting not only citizens but also legal residents.  As one of the leading lights among US universities and one that, throughout history, helped keep America's light shining, prohibiting free speech on campus would violate Harvard's tradition of promoting liberal, humanitarian values.

The justification cited by the Trump administration for seeking to make these unconstitutional demands, as well as pushing for an end to Harvard's DEI policies, is wafer thin, if not outright delusional: fighting anti-semitism.  That rationale is founded on protests against the inhumane treatment of Palestinian civilians in Israeli-occupied Gaza.  

To pile on more pressure Trump has threatened to take away Harvard's tax-exempt status.  While the impact of this isn't clear as applied against a university, some interpret that to mean that Harvard will be taxed on the income produced by its $54 billion endowment, the largest among the world's universities.  Due to Harvard's policy of subsidizing the tuitions and living costs of most of its American students, as well as paying an average salary of $276,000 for its tenured professors — nearly twice that of the average for all colleges — Harvard would face some financial hardship if the Trump administration is able to make good on its threats.

Facing the dystopian nightmare of staring down an irrational President whose self-image appears to be that of an emperor rather than an elected servant of the American people, Harvard had to walk the line between retaining an aggressive litigator and one who understands how to navigate Trumpian mishmash of misconceptions and prejudices. In that regard Harvard has likely succeeded in selecting Robert Hur.

Robert Kyoung Hur was born 1973 in New York to Korean immigrant parents.  His father was an anesthesiologist and his mother worked as the office manager in her husband's practice.  Robert grew up in Los Angeles where he attended the Harvard-Westlake School (then Harvard School), an exclusive private school for children of the wealthy.  The overriding goal of its students and their parents is acceptance into elite Ivy League colleges like Harvard University. 

Hur graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1995 with a degree in English and American literature.  He then spent two years at King's College in Cambridge pursuing a graduate degree in philosophy before a two-year stint at Boston Consulting.  

In 1998 he enrolled at Stanford Law School where he won the Kirkwood Moot Court Competition and was elected executive editor of Law Review.  To the JD he earned in 2001 was added the distinction of Order of the Coif, an honor society for law grads whose grades are in the top 10%.

Hur's heavy-duty legal ambition from the outset is evidenced by his willingness to forego lucrative big-firm jobs to invest two years in federal judicial clerkships.  The first was from 2001 to 2002 with Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the appellate district that includes California and the West Coast.  His second gig provided the most impressive credential of all for young lawyers — a Supreme Court clerkship.  The fact that his clerkship from 2002 to 2003 was with Chief Justice William Rehnquist may have been an influence on his conservative political leanings.

At about the time of his Supreme Court clerkship Hur met the woman who would provide another valuable credential — a spouse with a respectable legal background.  Cara Brewer, then a law student at George Washington University, happened to be a fellow subway rider.  Noticing his shy attention she struck up a conversation.  Hur worked up the nerve to offer her a ticket to a Supreme Court oral argument and made it a date with an offer of dinner to boot.

By the time they married in 2004 Robert had moved on to a special counsel post at the Bush Justice Department while Cara was an associate at the McLean, Virginia office of the San Francisco-based blue-chip firm of Pillsbury Winthrop.  The couple have three children, a son and two daughters.

Hur's link to Trump came on November 1, 2017 when he was nominated for the post of US Attorney for the District of Maryland.  The appointment was confirmed by the Senate on March 22, 2018.  Hur was sworn in on April 9, 2018.  

After the end of Trump's first term, in February 2021 Hur resigned to take up a lucrative partnership at the DC office of the LA-based global legal giant Gibson Dunn.

On January 12, 2023 Hur accepted a request by Attorney General Merrick Garland to be Special Counsel in charge of the Justice Department probe as to whether Joe Biden had violated regulations pertaining to classified documents while serving as President Obama's vice-president.

Hur's conclusion, reported to Congress on February 7, 2024, was that no charges were warranted despite “evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen."  The report concluded that the evidence would not support a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.  The most controversial part of the report was a portion that many, especially Democrats, felt was gratuitously damaging to Biden's reelection bid.

In providing his assessment of Biden's memory, Hur reported, "Biden would likely present himself to a jury ... as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

In retrospect some still consider this language to have damaged the perception of Joe Biden as a man whose faculties had been too diminished by age to serve a second term.  In this regard the language may be seen as a somewhat sly effort by Hur to seek a balanced end to his investigation, one that would subtly, possibly subversively, punish Biden without evidencing hostile intent.

This kind of subtle, nuanced strategic thinking could be the most valuable asset that Robert Hur may provide Harvard in its effort to deal with the nightmare of a would-be dictator apparently determined to subjugate or destroy every bastion of free speech, anti-authoritarian values and liberal academic philosophy.