Photo courtesy of FIU

By H.T. SMITH
[Editor’s Note: Smith authored this Letter to The Miami Herald Editor and included the OpEd on our Opinion page 4]

MIAMI – Serving as a Law Professor and the Inaugural Director of the Trial Advocacy Program at FIU College of Law for 23 years, I was privileged to accept Provost Elizabeth Behar’s invitation to become a member of the Law Dean Search Committee.

The committee’s responsibility was to recommend three candidates for the next dean of FIU’s third-ranked law school in Florida.

After the eleven-member committee met for the first time, I was proud to be a member of such an august body.

The Search Committee was chaired by the distinguished dean of the Medical School. It included representatives from the law school and other colleges at the university.

The members were diverse in terms of political and cultural ideology, and ethnicity.

The Committee also included the president of the Student Bar Association.

At our first meeting, the Committee received the provost’s charge governing our search process, and we began painstakingly reviewing 39 applications.

We then decided to conduct personal interviews with 10 candidates whose applications demonstrated they were the most qualified.

Attorney Daniel Epstein, a former attorney for President Donald Trump was one of the 39 applicants.

Epstein’s application was so deficient that he received only one vote to invite him for an interview, consequently, he was not interviewed.

After conducting interviews over three full days, the Search Committee deliberated on the 10 highly qualified candidates and voted to recommend three candidates to the President, consistent with our charge.

The administration then informed the Search Committee members that on a few occasions during the university’s history, a search had failed.

We were asked to continue to serve until the President made her selection from the three recommended candidates.

In the unlikely event the search failed, we would be asked to reconvene and resume searching for and screening candidates.

Thereafter, the Committee mem bers were notified the President rejected the Search Committee’s three recommendations, the search failed, the Committee was disbanded, and the President selected the Law Dean without further vetting by the Search Committee or meaningful input from the law school faculty.

Finally, it was announced that the President selected Daniel Epstein to serve as Interim Dean, even though her own Search Committee had deemed him woefully unqualified to lead FIU’s well-respected law school.

As your recently published head line read above the well-written article by Austin Horn, “Unusual”: How a Trump attorney became interim dean of FIU’s up-and-coming law school”.

The word “unusual” is a very charitable description of this highly flawed and politically poisoned law dean search process.

I read with interest the Editorial Board’s Opinion written by Mary Anna Mancuso titled, A “Trump lawyer” picked as dean of FIU Law recently, and I could not disagree more.

Attached is an OpEd which sets forth the objective and unbiased review that I made of Epstein’s application, experience, and accomplishments or lack thereof.

To add insult to injury, a federal judge found that Epstein committed fraud on the court in the $100 million lawsuit Trump filed against his own IRS and banned Epstein from practicing law in the Southern District Court of Florida for one year.