United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and the federal watchdog overseeing the union got into an extraordinary exchange two years ago in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war — a meeting that Fain now claims led to the monitor launching an investigation into him.
The expletive-laden discussion from February 2024 — details of which have never before been reported — is newly relevant after the court-appointed monitor, Neil Barofsky, released his latest blistering report about the union last month. It described how Fain, who is up for reelection this fall, had retaliated against union Vice President Rich Boyer, improperly used his authority to benefit his fiancée and her sister, and destroyed evidence including text messages.
Fain responded to that latest report by saying the monitor’s investigation had been politically motivated. And he pointed back to the heated Feb. 21, 2024, International Executive Board meeting with Barofsky, where the discussion centered on how the monitor had responded to the union’s statements on the war in Gaza, a conflict that had broken out just months earlier.
“For anybody to ever f——— say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat,” Fain said at one point during the Detroit meeting, which Barofsky, an attorney with the firm Jenner & Block LLP, had dialed into. “I do not f——— like that, and I don’t appreciate it.”
Barofsky strongly denied that he had used the word antisemitic or suggested as much about Fain during a phone call weeks earlier between the two, according to a detailed account of the episode provided to The Detroit News and confirmed by two people who have seen the transcripts.