33 Facts About Moe Davis

Morris Durham "Moe" Davis was born on July 31,1958 and is an American retired US Air Force colonel, attorney, educator, politician, and former administrative law judge.

Moe Davis served as director of the Air Force Judiciary.

Moe Davis resigned from the position after he refused to use evidence obtained through torture and because of political influence and pressure in prosecutions.

On March 3,2020, Moe Davis won the Democratic primary for North Carolina's 11th congressional district with 52,665 votes.

Moe Davis lost to Madison Cawthorn in his election bid to the House of Representatives in the 2020 general election.

Moe Davis was born and raised in Shelby, North Carolina, He studied Criminal Justice at Appalachian State in the nearby town of Boone, North Carolina, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1980.

Moe Davis is currently living with his wife Lisa, who works for an animal rescue, in Asheville, North Carolina.

Unlike his predecessors at Guantanamo, Fred Borch and Robert L Swann, Davis has been a visible public figure.

Moe Davis once said in an interview that he was asked to replace Borch at Guantanamo because of Borch's pushing of ethical bounds.

On February 28,2006, Moe Davis spoke out again regarding the commissions, saying:.

In March 2007, Moe Davis threatened Major Michael Mori, the military defense counsel assigned to Hicks' case with prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, claiming that Mori had acted improperly in criticizing the military commissions while in Australia gathering evidence for the defense.

On June 26,2007, an op-ed by Moe Davis, entitled "The Guantanamo I know", was published in The New York Times.

Moe Davis called the Supreme Court's intention to review the MCA "meddling":.

In October 2007, Colonel Moe Davis resigned from his position as Chief Prosecutor.

Moe Davis 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.

Moe 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.

In 2008, Moe 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.

Moe Davis 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.

Moe 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.

Moe Davis's 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.

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, Moe 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.

Moe Davis was Executive Director of the Crimes of War Education Project from 2010 to 2012.

Moe Davis 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.

Moe Davis was an administrative law judge with the US 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.

On November 17,2019, Moe Davis announced his congressional bid for North Carolina's 11th congressional district held by Republican Mark Meadows.

Moe Davis says he initially ran for Congress because he did not see a Democratic challenger running at the time that would beat Meadows.

Moe Davis won the primary on March 3,2020, with 47.35 percent of the vote.

Moe Davis described the party as being driven by "hate, fear, and dread," and accused it of embracing "fascism, racism, antisemitism, and misogyny".

In 2024, Moe Davis continued his political commentary, focusing on local politics in Western North Carolina.

Early endorsements for Moe Davis came from progressive Democrats, legal scholars, and human rights activists.

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

Moe Davis finds it appalling that Trump isolated the Kurds, and he believes that Trump was undermining all the hard work it took to build up US alliances.