Moe Davis

On June 26, 2007, an op-ed by Davis, entitled "The Guantanamo I know", was published in the New York Times.[18] In it, Davis argued that the Guantánamo Bay detention center is humane, professional, and operating in compliance with international law.

Congress authorized the military commission system under the Military Commissions Act of 2006, to create an alternative to the existing federal and military system. It restricted detainees as enemy combatants and those whose review was pending, to the military commission process; it prohibited their use of federal courts. The government stayed pending writs of habeas corpus.

On June 29, 2007, the Supreme Court agreed to hear some outstanding claims of habeas corpus, opening up the possibility that they might overturn some or all of the Military Commissions Act.[19]

Davis called the Supreme Court's intention to review the MCA "meddling": [20]

This constant uncertainty and meddling certainly takes a toll on people, It would be nice to have some certainty for a change.

In October 2007, Colonel Davis resigned from his position as Chief Prosecutor. He had made the policy that evidence obtained from the use of waterboarding, which he considered torture, would not be admissible as evidence in the military commissions. By this time, charges were being developed against high-value detainees, some of whom had been waterboarded in the custody of the CIA. Davis was overruled in his policy by his superiors, including William J. Haynes, II, the General Counsel for the Department of Defense.

Davis resigned in protest and transferred to become the Head of the Air Force Judiciary, stating, "The guy who said waterboarding is A-okay I was not going to take orders from. I quit."[21] He also charged that there was meddling from the Pentagon in cases, and claimed this presented serious conflicts of interest.[22]

Davis said he was denied an end-of-tour medal for his two years at Guantanamo because he resigned and later spoke out about problems in the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions. Davis stated about the medal denial, "I tell the truth, and I get labeled as having served dishonorably. I'm very concerned about the chilling effect ... on the process".[23] Since his resignation, Davis has frequently spoken out against the Commissions.[24]

In 2008, Davis was called by the defense to testify in the military commission of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, where he repeated his accusations of political interference. He said Pentagon interest in the progress of trials of detainees greatly increased after September 2006, when high-value detainees were transferred from the CIA to Guantanamo.[21]

Davis in January 2015

Davis was named the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division of the Congressional Research Service in December 2008; and was fired from this job in late November or early December 2009.[25] His firing was thought prompted because of an op-ed Davis published in the Wall Street Journal that criticized a federal proposal to prosecute detainees in either military commissions or federal courts; he believed that one venue had to be consistently used.[26] Davis wrote: "The administration must choose. Either federal courts or military commissions, but not both, for the detainees that deserve to be prosecuted and punished for their past conduct."[26]

In 2010, Davis sued the Library of Congress for wrongful termination under the Hatch Act in Davis v. Billington, claiming his First Amendment free speech rights were violated. The lawsuit was settled out of court and in 2016, Davis announced that his personnel file had been amended to remove language indicating that he had been separated "for cause" and that the Library of Congress had agreed to pay $100,000 in the settlement.[27]

Davis was Executive Director of the Crimes of War Education Project from 2010 to 2012.[28] He was assistant professor at Howard University School of Law from 2011 to 2015, teaching legal reasoning, research and writing, oral advocacy and national security law.[29]

Davis was an administrative law judge with the U.S. Department of Labor from 2015 to 2019, ruling on workers compensation cases involving issues from black lung disease to whistleblower cases, immigration visa appeals, child labor and other cases related to labor laws.

In the summer of 2019 Davis ruled[30] that a Baltimore, MD-based subsidiary of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Enterprise RAC Company of Baltimore, had violated United States labor law[31] while contracting for the Federal government. In his decision he ordered the company to pay a $6.6 million fine and offer other restitution for discrimination against African Americans in its hiring, training, and promotion selections.[32]

In an article on the lawsuit that preceded the Department of Labor ruling, the Baltimore Sun quoted an unnamed Enterprise company spokeswoman who contended that Enterprise had a "strong record of equal opportunity" in their hiring and employment practices and pointed to the company's recruitment outreach at HBCUs.[33]

Campaign logo for Moe Davis

On November 17, 2019 Davis announced a congressional bid for North Carolina's 11th congressional district held by retiring Republican Mark Meadows. Davis says that he initially ran for Congress because when he looked at the Democrats running with him, he didn't see anyone who could compete with Meadows. However, once Meadows dropped out of the race, he continued running because "I figured I’ve got 30-plus years of defending democracy, and just to sit back now and watch it go down the drain just wasn’t palatable."[2] Davis entered the Democratic primary along with Democrats Michael O'Shea, Gina Collias, Phillip Price and Steve Woodsmall. Davis won the primary on March 3, 2020, with 47.35 percent of the vote. Collias was a distant second with 22.67 percent.[34]

Early endorsements for Davis came from progressive Democrats, legal scholars, and human rights activists. Chris Lu, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of Labor under the Obama Administration pledged support, as did Fletcher, North Carolina-based civil rights attorney Frank Goldsmith, Harvard Law School professor and Constitutional Law expert Laurence Tribe, and Eugene R. Fidell, the Florence Rogatz Visiting Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School.[35] Davis was also endorsed by VoteVets.org, which represents 700,000 progressive veterans; the Sierra Club; Equality NC and the AFL-CIO Western North Carolina Central Labor Council.

During his post-military career Davis has published numerous op-eds and other criticisms of the Guantanamo Military Commission process.[36][37][38][39] On March 27, 2015, after Harvey Rishikof, the most recent convening authority for the Guantanamo military commissions was fired after less than a year on the job,[40] Morris wrote:

Think about that for a moment. If a professional football team was on its seventh head coach and sixth quarterback in less than a dozen years, that team would almost certainly be a loser.

Davis tweeted a claim that he was blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter prior to Trump's 2016 candidacy.[41]

Davis has openly opposed Trump's actions during his presidency. He finds it appalling that Trump isolated the Kurds, and he believes that Trump is undermining all the hard work it took to build up US alliances.[2]

Moe Davis attracted negative attention for his violence encouraging statements, "When @NCGOP extremists go low, we stomp their scrawny pasty necks with our heels and once you hear the sound of a crisp snap you grind your heel hard and twist it slowly side to side for good measure." He would be quoted on Twitter on several occasions for such violent rhetoric.[42]

Moe Davis accused his former opponent Congressman Madison Cawthorn of sedition under US law: "I was Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo for over 2 years and there’s far more evidence of Congressman Madison Cawthorn’s guilt than there was of guilt for 95+ percent of the detainees. It’s time we start a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists." [43]

• Moe Davis interview from Democracy Now!, July 16, 2008
• Moe Davis comments at National Press Club from C-SPAN, June 17, 2016

• Retired colonel fights Library of Congress over firing December 6, 2010
• U.S. v Omar Khadr (.pdf), US Department of Defense, November 2005
• Official biography (.pdf), US Department of Defense
• "Military Commissions in the War on Terror [CWRU]". JURIST. March 9, 2006. Archived from the original on August 21, 2007. Retrieved 2007-06-28.
• Morris Davis (February 17, 2008). "Unforgivable Behavior, Inadmissible Evidence". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-02-10.