Top Trump attorney Daniel Epstein named interim dean at FIU law school

Florida International University has a new law school dean with deep ties to President Donald Trump.

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Daniel Epstein, who served as counsel to the Trump White House in the president’s first term and has also worked as his personal attorney, was announced as interim dean at FIU’s College of Law on Monday.

Epstein will take over for Michelle D. Mason, who has served in the interim role since May 2025, when former dean Antony Page stepped down. He will start in August.

Page is now dean at Chapman University in Orange County, California.

Epstein is one of several politically connected Republicans to have earned top roles at one of Florida’s public universities in recent years. Former Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez was hired as president of FIU last year at the request of Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Earlier this month, Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas was named the new president of Polk State College; Kamoutsas’ predecessor, Manny Diaz, Jr., was hired to lead the University of West Florida in January; former Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner took the top job at Florida Atlantic University last year.

In higher education, Epstein has served as the chair of Palm Beach State College for nearly one year. He has also worked as a professor at St. Thomas University’s Benjamin L. Crump College of Law for more than three years, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Epstein has an extensive background in conservative legal circles.

He represented Trump in a personal capacity in the president’s suit against the Justice Department for its investigation into possible ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign as well as a 2022 FBI-led search for classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach.

In Trump’s first term in office, Epstein worked as “Senior Associate Counsel and Special Assistant to the President” in the White House. He was nominated to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in 2019, but his nomination was returned to the president after the Senate neither confirmed nor rejected the nomination in six months.

Epstein now serves as vice president of America First Legal, the conservative litigation group founded by Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who has led the president’s crackdowns on illegal immigration. He has also been an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce under Secretary Howard Lutnick.

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Epstein founded Cause of Action, a public interest law firm that represented plaintiffs in the Supreme Court of the United States case that curtailed federal agencies’ regulatory power, a ruling cheered by anti-regulation conservatives.

In Florida, Epstein was a member of Attorney General James Uthmeier’s transition team. He’s also a member of the judicial nomination committee for Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal.

Epstein earned his bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in Ohio. He got his law degree from Emory University and earned his PhD from George Washington University in 2022.

Before Epstein was named interim dean, FIU had conducted a months-long search process for a permanent dean. Epstein was not one of the finalists announced in March.

Finalists included David Brennen, former dean of the University of Kentucky’s law school; Andrew Dawson, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs at University of Miami’s School of Law; and Sean M. O’Connor, formerly of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.

Prior to Page’s tenure as dean, from 2018 to 2025, the previous dean for eight years was Alex Acosta, a Miami native and former U.S. Secretary of Labor in Trump’s first term. Acosta resigned from his Washington role after facing scrutiny over a plea deal brokered with notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein (no apparent relation to Daniel Epstein).

FIU’s College of Law was founded in 2000. U.S. News & World Report ranks it as the 77th-best law school in the country, behind schools at Florida State University and the University of Florida, which are tied for 34th.

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