About: David Halperin
Twitter: @DaHalperin
Bio: David Halperin is the co-founder and editor of Republic Report. Halperin, a self-employed lawyer based in Washington DC, engages in public advocacy, investigative work, and legal representation on a wide range of issues, including higher education, climate change, democracy, corruption, open government, and national security. He also advises organizations and companies on strategy, policy, communications, and legal matters. He is of counsel to Public.Resource.org, a non-profit focused on making legal and government materials available for free to the public.
Halperin’s investigative and advocacy work on predatory for-profit colleges since 2010 has spurred reforms in policy and regulations, triggered law enforcement investigations, and led to the closure of numerous deceptive schools.
Halperin was from 2004 until 2012 the founding director of Campus Progress and senior vice president at the Center for American Progress. Before that, he was: senior policy advisor for Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign; founding executive director of the American Constitution Society; White House speechwriter and special assistant for national security affairs to President Clinton; co-founder of the Internet company Progressive Networks (now called RealNetworks); counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee; law clerk to U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell (D.D.C.); research assistant to Robert S. McNamara; and research analyst at the Arms Control Association.
Halperin has represented clients in the U.S. Supreme Court and various state and federal courts. Among many other efforts, Halperin helped represent Greenpeace in an unprecedented 2004 Miami criminal jury trial over protest activity, resulting in a directed verdict of acquittal; aided climate groups facing investigation by the House Science Committee during 2015-16; and represented Public Resource in landmark copyright litigation from 2012 to 2024 over efforts to make federal regulations publicly available online without charge.
Halperin writes at Republic Report, and his articles also have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Politico, Slate, Foreign Policy, and other outlets. In recent years he has testified before the House Oversight Committee and at several federal agencies, and he has spoken at major conferences and events across the country. Halperin has served since 2007 on the board of directors of Public Citizen.
Halperin graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School.
Trump Vetoes Bill To Protect Students and Taxpayers from Scam Colleges
Donald Trump just vetoed the bipartisan student debt relief bill. Trump chose to stand with Betsy DeVos and the wealthy owners of predatory for-profit colleges, operations similar to his own fraudulent Trump University, and to stand against defrauded students, i.e. all the people that, as a candidate, he promised to help: veterans, “forgotten” working people,
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Florida Career College Works to Silence Former Employees
Just days after Republic Report published an article, based on interviews with former employees of Florida Career College, about abuses at the school, the college’s parent company wrote to ex-staffers warning them to keep quiet, or else possibly be sued. In letters to former employees, attached to emails sent last week, Aaron Mortensen, general counsel
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WATCH: COVID-19 Protestors, Like Their President and Party, Are Simply Savages
Watch this video, filmed today in Commack, Long Island, New York, by News12’s Kevin Vesey: Protestors against safety measures to protect people from COVID-19 angrily confront the reporter, mindlessly calling him “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” as if they were zombies unleashed from the brain of Donald Trump. The level of anger
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College Owner Who Heads DeVos Panel Is Sued By Mother For Alleged Fraud and Theft
Arthur Keiser, the politically-connected “Chancellor and CEO” of Florida-based Keiser University, has been sued by his 96-year old mother for allegedly cheating her out of income generated by businesses they own together — an escalation of a messy family dispute over a lucrative for-profit college fortune, with damaging charges and counter-charges and an effort by
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Ex-Employees: Florida Career College Enrolled “Anyone With a Pulse”
The Orlando campus of Florida Career College, according to former employees there, would enroll, as one of them put it, “anyone with a pulse,” even though the school’s programs often failed to help students succeed. According to the ex-employees, the for-profit college’s recruiters found homeless people in strip mall parking lots and lured them to
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VIDEO: Mitch McConnell “truly the most corrupt politician in the U.S.”
Earlier this month, journalist Jane Mayer published a blockbuster report on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a deep dive into the deep corruption of a powerful politician who seems to have no moral compass, no strongly-held values, just an intense desire to increase his own power by aiding the entrenched special interests that fund
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Who’s Lobbying To Get COVID-19 Cash to For-Profit Colleges?
Howard “Buck” McKeon, a Republican former chairman of the House Education Committee, heads up the list of lobbyists paid, largely with your federal tax dollars, to lobby Congress to send even more tax dollars to for-profit colleges in the COVID-19 era. Lobbying reports for the first quarter of 2020 show that just a few of
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Florida For-Profit College, Getting $17 Million in COVID-19 Aid, Accused of Scamming Black Students
Faced with concerns from critics in Congress and elsewhere that many for-profit colleges will take advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to accelerate predatory behavior, the industry’s chief lobbyist, Steve Gunderson, has been repeating his claim that the bad actors among for-profit schools have shuttered, and what remains are sincere, hard-working operations focused on helping students.
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