Trump Organization signals it will fire lawyer over work for Harvard
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The Trump Organization has indicated it will fire William Burck, the Quinn Emanuel lawyer it hired as its ethics adviser, after President Donald Trump said he should be removed because of his work for Harvard University.
The president’s son Eric Trump said on Thursday that he viewed Burck’s work for Harvard and the Trump Organization as a “conflict” and added: “I will be moving in a different direction,” in comments confirmed to the Financial Times by a spokesperson for the company.
It came hours after the president posted on Truth Social that he hoped his “very big and beautiful company, now run by my sons, gets rid of him ASAP!”
Burck, global co-managing partner of Quinn Emanuel, is representing Harvard in its battle with the Trump administration. The government has said it will freeze funding to the university, which Trump described in his Truth Social post on Thursday as an “Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution”.
The Trump Organization hired Burck in January to help it develop ethics policies to prevent conflicts of interest with the administration. In a press release about the appointment, the company said Burck was “widely regarded as one of the Nation’s finest and most respected lawyers”.
Burck declined to comment.
The Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in funding to top universities and sought to increase government oversight of them, saying they have failed to tackle antisemitism. On Wednesday it accused institutions including Harvard of breaking federal laws on large foreign donations.
Harvard has sued the administration in a bid to stop it from freezing more than $3bn in federal funding, and Burck is among the team of lawyers who filed the lawsuit on the school’s behalf. Harvard’s president Alan Garber said this week that the government’s demands “would impose unprecedented and improper control” over the university.
Burck has previously represented Trump associates including Steve Bannon, and was involved in brokering a deal between the law firm Paul Weiss and the administration last month, after the president issued an executive order that directed federal agencies to withdraw the law firm’s security clearances and end government contracts with it.
