Embedded Files
Relatives:
Father : Donald Barr (born 1921) / Mother :
Grandfather (paternal) - Simon Pelham Barr (born 1892)
Grandmother (paternal) - Estelle De Young Barr (born 1893)
NOTE: Estelle De Young Barr's brother David S Barr (born 1894) married Elinor Sachs Barr (born 1894) , who was the brother of Alexander Sachs (born 1892) )
The second of four [brothers], [William Barr] grew up on the Upper West Side [of Manhattan]. [...] After high school, Barr entered Columbia University, where he majored in government and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1971. He then did two years of graduate study at Columbia, receiving an Master of Arts in government and Chinese studies in 1973. While employed at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1973 to 1977, he attended the evening division of George Washington University Law School, graduating with a Juris Doctor in 1977.
Early career
Early career
From 1973 to 1977, Barr was employed by the CIA, initially for a short period as a China analyst, then in the legislative affairs section. After graduating from law school, Barr was a law clerk to Judge Malcolm Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1977 through 1978. He was in private practice with the Washington law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge from 1978 to 1982 and again from 1983 to 1989,[9] after serving as Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy on the domestic policy staff at the Reagan White House from May 1982 to September 1983.
U.S. Department of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice
In 1989, at the beginning of his administration, President George H. W. Bush appointed Barr to the U.S. Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an office which functions as the legal advisor for the President and executive agencies. Barr was known as a strong defender of presidential power.[12] He wrote an advisory opinion justifying the U.S. invasion of Panama and arrest of Manuel Noriega.[12] He wrote legal justifications for the practice of rendition,[13] so that the FBI could enter onto foreign soil without the consent of the host government to apprehend fugitives wanted by the United States government for terrorism or drug-trafficking.[12] Barr declined a congressional request for the full opinion, but instead provided a document that "summarizes the principal conclusions." Congress subpoenaed the opinion, and its public release after Barr's departure from the Justice Department showed he had omitted significant findings in the opinion from his summary document.[14]
U.S. Deputy Attorney General (1990–1991)
U.S. Deputy Attorney General (1990–1991)
In May 1990, Barr was appointed Deputy Attorney General, the official responsible for day-to-day management of the Department. According to media reports, Barr was generally praised for his professional management of the Department.[15][16][17]
During August 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh resigned to campaign for the Senate, Barr was named Acting Attorney General.[18] Three days after Barr accepted that position, 121 Cuban inmates, awaiting deportation to Cuba, seized 9 hostages at the Talladega federal prison. He directed the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team to assault the prison, which resulted in rescuing all hostages without loss of life.[19][20]
U.S. Attorney General (1991–1993)
U.S. Attorney General (1991–1993)
First nomination and confirmation
It was reported that President Bush was impressed with Barr's management of the hostage crisis; weeks later, Bush nominated him as Attorney General.[21]
Barr enjoyed a "sterling reputation" among Republican and Democratic politicians alike.[22] His two-day confirmation hearing was "unusually placid", and he was received well by both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.[23] Asked whether he thought a constitutional right to privacy included the right to an abortion, Barr responded that he believed the constitution was not originally intended to create a right to abortion; that Roe v. Wade was thus wrongly decided; and that abortion should be a "legitimate issue for state legislators".[23] "Barr also said at the hearings that Roe v. Wade was 'the law of the land' and claimed he did not have 'fixed or settled views' on abortion."[24] Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden, though disagreeing with Barr, responded that it was the "first candid answer" he had heard from a nominee on a question that witnesses would normally evade; Biden hailed Barr as "a throwback to the days when we actually had attorneys general that would talk to you."[25] Barr was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, was confirmed by voice vote by the full Senate,[26][27] and was sworn in as Attorney General on November 26, 1991.[28]
77th and 85th United States Attorney General
Incumbent
Assumed office February 14, 2019
PresidentDonald TrumpDeputyRod RosensteinEd O'Callaghan (acting)Jeffrey A. RosenPreceded byJeff SessionsIn officeNovember 26, 1991 – January 20, 1993
PresidentGeorge H. W. BushDeputyGeorge J. Terwilliger IIIPreceded byDick ThornburghSucceeded byJanet Reno25th United States Deputy Attorney General
In officeMay 26, 1990 – November 26, 1991
PresidentGeorge H. W. BushPreceded byDonald B. AyerSucceeded byGeorge J. Terwilliger IIIUnited States Assistant Attorney Generalfor the Office of Legal Counsel
In officeJanuary 20, 1989 – May 26, 1990
PresidentGeorge H. W. BushPreceded byDouglas KmiecSucceeded byJ. Michael LuttigPersonal details
BornWilliam Pelham BarrMay 23, 1950 (age 70)New York City, New York, U.S.Political partyRepublicanSpouse(s)Christine Moynihan (m. 1973)Children3ParentsDonald BarrMary Margaret AhernRelativesStephen Barr (brother)EducationColumbia University(BA, MA)George Washington University(JD)Signature
Early life and educationBarr was born in New York City in 1950. His father, Donald Barr, taught English literature at Columbia University before becoming headmaster of the Dalton School in Manhattan and later the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, both members of the Ivy Preparatory School League. Barr's mother, Mary Margaret (née Ahern), also taught at Columbia.[9] Barr's father was Jewish and raised in Judaism but later converted to Christianity and joined the Catholic Church. His mother is of Irish ancestry. Barr was raised as a Catholic.[10][11] Barr was the second of four sons, and his younger brother Stephen Barr is a professor of physics at the University of Delaware.[12]Barr grew up on New York City's Upper West Side. As a child he attended a Catholic grammar school, Corpus Christi School, and then the non-sectarian Horace Mann School. After high school, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in government and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1971. He did two additional years of graduate study at Columbia, receiving an Master of Arts in government and Chinese studies in 1973. While at Columbia, Barr opposed anti-Vietnam War occupation protests by students on campus.[13]Barr moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an intelligence analyst for the CIA while taking evening classes at George Washington University Law School, graduating in 1977 with a Juris Doctor with highest honors.[14][15]CareerEarly careerBarr with President Ronald Reaganin the Oval Office in 1983From 1971 to 1977, while attending graduate school and law school, Barr worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[16] He was first hired as a summer intern for two years.[13] During his law school years he was an analyst in the Intelligence Directorate division from 1973 to 1975, and then transitioning to an assistant in the Office of Legislative Counsel and an agency liaison to Congress from 1975 to 1977.[16][17][18][19]After graduating from law school in 1977, Barr spent one year as a law clerk to Judge Malcolm Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.[20][14] He then joined the law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman) from 1978 to 1982 and again from 1983 to 1989,[20] after serving as Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy on the domestic policy staff at the Reagan White House from May 1982 to September 1983.[20][14][21]U.S. Department of JusticeBarr and Dan Quayle watch as President George H. W. Bush signs the Civil Rights Commission Reauthorization Act in the Rose Garden of the White House in 1991.In 1989, at the beginning of his administration, President George H. W. Bush appointed Barr to the U.S. Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an office which functions as the legal advisor for the President and executive agencies. Barr was known as a strong defender of presidential power.[22] He wrote an advisory opinion justifying the U.S. invasion of Panama and arrest of Manuel Noriega.[22] He wrote legal justifications for the practice of rendition,[23] so that the FBI could enter onto foreign soil without the consent of the host government to apprehend fugitives wanted by the United States government for terrorism or drug-trafficking.[22] Barr declined a congressional request for the full 1989 opinion, but instead provided a document that "summarizes the principal conclusions". Congress subpoenaed the opinion, and its public release after Barr's departure from the Justice Department showed he had omitted significant findings in the opinion from his summary document.[24]U.S. Deputy Attorney General (1990–1991)In May 1990, Barr was appointed Deputy Attorney General, the official responsible for day-to-day management of the Department. According to media reports, Barr was generally praised for his professional management of the Department.[25][26][27]During August 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh resigned to campaign for the Senate, Barr was named Acting Attorney General.[28] Three days after Barr accepted that position, 121 Cuban inmates, awaiting deportation to Cuba, seized nine hostages at the Talladega federal prison. He directed the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team to assault the prison, which resulted in rescuing all hostages without loss of life.[29][30]U.S. Attorney General (1991–1993)Official photo of Barr during his first tenure as Attorney GeneralFirst nomination and confirmationIt was reported that President Bush was impressed with Barr's management of the hostage crisis; weeks later, Bush nominated him as Attorney General.[31]Barr enjoyed a "sterling reputation" among Republican and Democratic politicians alike.[32] His two-day confirmation hearing was "unusually placid", and he was received well by both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.[33] Asked whether he thought a constitutional right to privacy included the right to an abortion, Barr responded that he believed the Constitution was not originally intended to create a right to abortion; that Roe v. Wade was thus wrongly decided; and that abortion should be a "legitimate issue for state legislators".[33] "Barr also said at the hearings that Roe v. Wade was 'the law of the land' and claimed he did not have 'fixed or settled views' on abortion."[34] Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden, though disagreeing with Barr, responded that it was the "first candid answer" he had heard from a nominee on a question that witnesses would normally evade; Biden hailed Barr as "a throwback to the days when we actually had attorneys general that would talk to you."[35] Barr was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, was confirmed by voice vote by the full Senate,[36][37] and was sworn in as Attorney General on November 26, 1991.[38]First tenureDuring his first tenure as AG, media characterized Barr as "a staunch conservative who rarely hesitates to put his hardline views into action."[39][40][41] He was described as affable with a dry, self-deprecating wit.[39][42] The New York Times described the "central theme" of his tenure to be "his contention that violent crime can be reduced only by expanding Federal and state prisons to jail habitual violent offenders."[40] In an effort to prioritize violent crime, Barr reassigned three hundred FBI agents from counterintelligence work to investigations of gang violence. The New York Times called this move "the largest single manpower shift in the bureau's history."[40]During the 1992 election year, the Wall Street Journal wrote of Barr's work that he "has put a heavy emphasis on attention-grabbing events and pronouncements that may have more to do with presidential election-year politicking than with fighting crime on the streets."[43]The Case for More IncarcerationThe Case for More IncarcerationIn 1992, Barr authored a report, The Case for More Incarceration,[44] which argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate, the creation of a national program to construct more prisons, and the abolition of parole release.[4] Barr argued that incarceration reduced crime, pointing to crime and incarceration rates in 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. A 1999 criminology study criticized Barr's analysis, saying "so complex an issue as the relationship between crime and punishment cannot be addressed through so simplistic an analysis as a negative correlation between the two very aggregated time series of crime rates and incarceration rates."[45] University of Minnesota criminologist Michael Tonry said the data in Barr's report was deceptively presented; if Barr had chosen five-year intervals, then the data would not have supported Barr's argument, and if Barr had chosen to look at violent crime specifically (as opposed to all crimes as a category), then the data would not have supported his argument.[46]Barr said in the report, "The benefits of increased incarceration would be enjoyed disproportionately by black Americans".[46] In the report, Barr approvingly quoted New Mexico Attorney General Hal Stratton, "I don't know anyone [who] goes to prison on their first crime. By the time you go to prison, you are a pretty bad guy."[47] Barr's report influenced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which aimed to increase the incarceration rate.[4]InvestigationsIn October 1991, Barr appointed then-retired Democratic Chicago judge Nicholas Bua as special counsel in the Inslaw scandal. Bua's 1993 report found the Department of Justice guilty of no wrongdoing in the matter.[48]In October 1992, Barr appointed then retired New Jersey federal judge Frederick B. Lacey to investigate the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency handling of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) Iraqgate scandal.[49] The appointment came after Democrats called for a special prosecutor during the scandal fearing a "cover-up" by the administration. House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. González called for Barr's resignation, citing "repeated, clear failures and obstruction" by the Department of Justice in allegedly delaying an investigation of the BNL-Iraqgate case.[50][51] González also called for an independent special counsel investigation.[51]Phone surveillance programIn 1992, Barr launched a surveillance program to gather records of innocent Americans' international phone calls.[52] The DoJ inspector general concluded that this program had been launched without a review of its legality.[52] According to USA Today, the program "provided a blueprint for far broader phone-data surveillance the government launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."[52]In December 2019, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Patrick J. Leahy asked the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate Barr for approving an illegal surveillance program without legal analysis.[53]Iran-ContraIn late 1992, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who had been chosen to investigate the Iran–Contra affair, found documents in the possession of Reagan's former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, which Walsh said was "evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public."[54][55] Weinberger was set to stand trial on felony charges on January 5, 1993.[54][56] His "indictment said Mr. Weinberger's notes contradicted Mr. Bush's assertions that he had only a fragmentary knowledge of the arms secretly sold to Iran in 1985 and 1986 in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon."[56][55][57] According to Walsh, then-president Bush might have been called as a witness.[58]On December 24, 1992, during his final month in office, Bush, on the advice of Barr, pardoned Weinberger,[14][59] along with five other administration officials who had been found guilty on charges relating to the Iran–Contra affair.[14][60][61][54] Barr was consulted extensively regarding the pardons, and especially advocated for pardoning Weinberger.[62]Walsh complained about the move insinuating that Bush on Barr's advice had used the pardons to avoid testifying and stating that: "The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."[63] In 2003, he wrote an account of the investigation in his book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.Because of this and Barr's unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into a second scandal known as Iraqgate, New York Times writer William Safire began to refer to Barr as "Coverup-General Barr."[64] Barr, however, responded that he believed Bush had made the right decision regarding that and he felt people in the case had been treated unfairly.[65] Barr said Walsh was a "head-hunter" who "had completely lost perspective."[2]Post-DOJ careerUpon leaving the DOJ in 1993, Barr was appointed by Virginia Governor George Allen to co-chair a commission to implement tougher criminal justice policies and abolish parole in the state.[66][67] Barr has been described as a "leader of the parole-abolition campaign" in Virginia.[68]After leaving the DOJ, he criticized the Clinton administration for being "soft on crime".[69] Barr expressed his opposition to efforts to end mandatory minimum sentencing.[69] In a 1993 op-ed, he wrote, "The notion that there are sympathetic people out there who become hapless victims of the criminal-justice system and are locked away in federal prison beyond the time they deserve is simply a myth."[70][69] In a 1995 essay, Barr rejected that crime was caused by material factors, such as poverty, arguing instead that crime was caused by immorality: "Spending more money on these material social programs is not going to have an impact on crime, and, if anything, it will exacerbate the problem."[70]In 1994, Barr became Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the telecommunications company GTE Corporation, where he served for 14 years. During his corporate tenure, Barr directed a successful litigation campaign by the local telephone industry to achieve deregulation by scuttling a series of FCC rules, personally arguing several cases in the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court.[71][72] In 2000, when GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to become Verizon Communications, Barr became the general counsel and executive vice president of Verizon until he retired in 2008.[73] Barr became a multimillionaire from working in GTE and Verizon. In 2001, Barr's salary was reportedly $1.5 million.[13]From 1997 to 2000, Barr served on the Board of Visitors of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg.[74]In 2009, Barr was briefly of counsel to the firm Kirkland & Ellis. From 2010 until 2017, he advised corporations on government enforcement matters and regulatory litigation; he rejoined Kirkland and Ellis in 2017.[75]From 2009 to 2018, Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner.[76]Comments about the Starr investigation of President ClintonIn March 1998, Barr lambasted the Clinton administration for criticizing Independent Counsel Ken Starr's investigation of the Whitewater controversy, which had shifted towards an investigation of an alleged affair between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.[2] Barr said the criticism appeared "to have the improper purpose of influencing and impeding an ongoing criminal investigation and intimidating possible jurors, witnesses and even investigators."[2]Comments about the Trump administrationOn April 18, 2019, a redactedversion of Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election was released to the public.During the first two years of the Trump presidency, Barr frequently criticized legal challenges against Trump and investigations into the Trump 2016 campaign and presidency.[77][78]In 2017, Barr said there was "nothing inherently wrong" with Donald Trump's calls for investigating Hillary Clinton while the two were both running for president. Barr added that an investigation into an alleged Uranium One controversy was more warranted than looking into whether Trump conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 elections.[79] Barr also said in 2017 that he didn't think "all this stuff" about incarcerating or prosecuting Hillary Clinton was appropriate to say, but added that "there are things that should be investigated that haven't been investigated," although the FBI began investigating the Clinton Foundation and the related Uranium One matter in 2015, followed by investigations by Republican congressional committees.[80][81][82]In February 2017, Barr argued Trump was justified in firing Acting Attorney General Sally Yates over her refusal to defend Executive Order 13769.[83]Barr was publicly critical of the special counsel investigation. In 2017, he faulted Mueller for hiring prosecutors who have contributed to Democratic politicians, saying that his team should have had more "balance," and characterized the obstruction of justice investigation as "asinine" and that it was "taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president."[84][85]In June 2018, Barr sent an unsolicited 20-page memo to senior Justice Department officials. He also provided copies to members of Trump's legal team and discussed it with some of them.[86] In his memo, Barr argued that the Special Counsel should not be investigating Trump for obstruction of justice because Trump's actions, such as firing FBI Director James Comey, were within his powers as head of the executive branch.[87][88][89] He characterized the obstruction investigation as "fatally misconceived" and "grossly irresponsible" and "potentially disastrous" to the executive branch.[90][91] The day after the existence of the memo became known, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said "our decisions are informed by our knowledge of the actual facts of the case, which Mr. Barr didn't have."[92]Democrats later characterized the memo as Barr's "job application" for the Attorney General position.[93]Political donationsThe National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) financially assists Republicans in their Senate election contests; in the seven years from 2009 to 2016, Barr gave six donations to the NRSC totaling $85,400. In a five-month period from October 2018 to February 2019, Barr donated five times (around $10,000 every month) for a total of $51,000. When Barr started donating more frequently to the NRSC, it was uncertain whether then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would remain in his job. Barr continued donating even after Sessions resigned, and after Trump nominated Barr for Attorney General. The donations stopped after Barr was confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General. NRSC refunded Barr $30,000 before his confirmation. Previously in 2017, Barr had said he felt "prosecutors who make political contributions are identifying fairly strongly with a political party".[94]U.S. Attorney General (2019–present)Barr is sworn in as Attorney General by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2019.Second nomination and confirmationOn December 7, 2018, President Donald Trump announced Barr's nomination to succeed Jeff Sessions.[95][96] Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman reported that Trump had sought Barr as chief defense lawyer for Trump regarding the special counsel investigation headed by Robert Mueller after Barr made three positions known. First, Barr supported Trump's firing of Comey on May 9, 2017. Second, he questioned the appointments of some of Mueller's prosecutors due to political donations they had made to the Clinton campaign. Third, he alleged there were conflicts of interest of two appointees to the Special Counsel Team, Jennie Rheeand Bruce Ohr.[97][98][99]Barr meets with the Justice Department leadership.Barr was confirmed as Attorney General on February 14, 2019, by a 54–45 near party-line vote, with Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) as the three Democrats to vote Yea. Republican senator Rand Paul (R-KY) voted No and Richard Burr (R-NC) did not vote.[100][101] Later that day, Barr was sworn-in as the nation's 85th Attorney General by Chief Justice John Roberts in a ceremony at the White House.[102] He is the first person to be appointed to a second non-consecutive term as Attorney General since John J. Crittenden in 1850.[103]Second tenureIn May 2019, three months into his tenure as Attorney General, the Associated Press characterized Barr as a champion and advocate for Trump.[104] Barr had enthusiastically supported Trump's political agenda, misrepresented aspects of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, repeated Trump's talking point that those investigating Trump had engaged in "spying", defied congressional subpoenas, and refused to give Congress an unredacted version of the Mueller report.[104]Under Barr's leadership, the Justice Department changed its position on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Previously the department took the position that the individual mandate provision was unconstitutional, but could be severed from the whole healthcare law. On March 25, the department updated its position to argue that the entire law is unconstitutional.[105] On May 2, the department conducted a filing with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to nullify the entire law, arguing that the removal of the provision on individual mandate results in the entire law becoming unconstitutional.[106]On May 1, 2019, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told the House Oversight Committee that Barr had instructed Justice Department official John Gore to refuse a subpoena to testify in front of the committee. The committee subpoenaed Gore over the Trump administration's efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 United States Census. The reason for the refusal was that the committee's decision to not allow a Justice Department lawyer to accompany Gore during testimony violated "the confidentiality interests of the Executive Branch" (though a separate room was permitted).[107] In early June the House Oversight Committee moved to hold Barr in contempt of congress for defying a subpoena regarding the efforts to add a citizenship question to the census.[108] In July 2019, the House of Representatives voted 230–198 to hold Barr (and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross) in criminal contempt of Congress, after they failed to produce documents as April 2019 congressional subpoenas mandated. The documents, on the planned (and eventually scrapped) citizenship question in the 2020 census, were withheld due to a "deliberative process" and "attorney-client communications", according to the Justice Department. President Trump also asserted executive privilege over the documents to withhold them from Congress. Only once prior has a sitting Cabinet member been held in criminal contempt of Congress (Eric Holder in 2012). The House instructed the Justice Department to prosecute Barr, but the Department refused.[109][110]Also in July 2019, Barr reportedly made the decision to not bring federal civil rights charges against New York policeman Daniel Pantaleo for causing the death of Eric Garner. In so doing, he overruled the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which advocated charging Pantaleo, instead agreeing with Justice Department prosecutors from New York.[111]On July 25, 2019, Barr reinstated the death penalty for federal crimes.[112]In December 2019, Barr said that communities that do not show the "respect and support that law enforcement deserves ... might find themselves without the police protection they need."[113] Barr dropped the Department of Justice's case against the police officer who killed Eric Garner in 2014.[13]In February 2020, Senator Lindsey Graham stated that the Justice Department "is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from" Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer to president Donald Trump. Graham had learned from Barr that "they've created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it's verified". A day later, Barr confirmed Graham's account, stating that he had "established an intake process" for information on Ukraine, including from Giuliani, while citing an "obligation to have an open door" policy on receiving information. Giuliani has claimed to have information of improprieties regarding Ukraine for Joe Biden (a former vice president, later a 2020 presidential candidate) and his son Hunter Biden. Giuliani himself is reportedly being investigated by the Justice Department, with two of his associates having been arrested.[114][115][116]In early June 2020, according to reporting by The Washington Post and Fox News, Barr personally ordered that the streets around Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C. should be cleared so that Trump, Barr and other administration officials could stage a photo op in front of St. John's Church. At the time, the streets were occupied by peaceful protesters as part of the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C. Barr's order resulted in federal law enforcement officers rushing protesters, and employing smoke canisters, pepper balls, riot shields, and batons against the protesters.[117][118] Barr reacted to the incident by falsely claiming that pepper balls (used by law enforcement on protesters) were not chemical irritants (pepper balls contain pelargonic acid vanillylamide, a chemical irritant; while the product's manufacturer, and the Justice Department, both consider pepper balls a chemical irritant).[119] In August 2020, he invoked qualified immunity before a federal court to protect himself from liability in a lawsuit regarding the Lafayette Square incident.[120]As Attorney General, Barr sowed doubt about the integrity of the 2020 election.[121] In a September 2020 interview, Barr falsely asserted the Justice Department had indicted a Texas man for fraudulently completing 1,700 mail-in ballots. There was no such indictment, and the matter actually involved a series of errors by election officials during a county election, rather than fraud.[122] Barr also repeated a claim that foreign adversaries could flood the country with counterfeit ballots to disrupt the election, a threat that experts characterized as nearly impossible to execute.[123][124] Senior American intelligence officials have said there was no evidence any foreign powers intended to manipulate mail-in voting.[125] The day after Barr's interview, the Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence bulletin warning that Russia is using social media and other venues to promote false claims that mail voting will lead to widespread fraud, in order "to undermine public trust in the electoral process."[126] In a subsequent September 2020 interview, Barr stated that mail-in voting meant “we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes” including “outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.”[127] On October 1, 2020, more than 1,600 former DOJ attorneys signed an open letter stating, "we fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ’s vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections."[128]In mid-June 2020, Barr announced that Geoffrey Berman, the court-appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), "is stepping down". Berman's office had been investigating both Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump's inaugural committee, as well as conducting a wider investigation into Trump's company and his associates after successfully prosecuting Michael Cohen, another personal lawyer of Trump.[129] CNN also reported that Berman had prosecuted Halkbank despite Barr's attempt to try to avoid charges for the Turkish state-owned bank, after Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan requested Trump to help drop the charges.[130][131][132][133] Simultaneously, Barr announced that at his recommendation, Trump had appointed Craig Carpenito as the interim SDNY U.S. Attorney, in a departure from the tradition of a career prosecutor from SDNY taking the interim role. Also concurrently, Barr said that Trump would nominate Jay Clayton for the permanent role of SDNY U.S. Attorney.[130][131] Within a day, Berman said that he actually had "not resigned, and have no intention of resigning". Berman also said that he only learned of his supposed departure from Barr's public announcement.[131][132] Barr then informed Berman that Trump had fired Berman at Barr's request. Barr did not give a reason for Berman's firing. As a result of the firing, the deputy SDNY U.S. Attorney, Audrey Strauss, would become the interim SDNY U.S. Attorney. With this, Berman agreed to leave. Meanwhile, the Senate indicated it would not confirm Clayton as the permanent replacement.[133][132]Barr has made commentary about social and religious issues in speeches and television appearances. In an October 2019 address at the University of Notre Dame, Barr asserted that “militant secularists" had been attacking Judeo-Christian values for five decades, stating, "This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secular forces and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia, in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values."[134] In an August 2020 appearance on Fox News, Barr asserted that Black Lives Matter is "a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism. They're essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic." Barr equated the movement with antifa, characterizing that loose collective as "highly organized" and claiming "the media doesn’t take footage of what’s happening" at George Floyd protests. He also claimed that liberals are intent on “tearing down the system” and that the Democratic party was only "interested in total victory. It’s a secular religion. It’s a substitute for a religion."[135] Barr had in June 2020 blamed antifa for orchestrating the George Floyd protests, but analysis by The New York Times found that no one arrested for serious federal crimes at the protests had been linked to antifa.[136] Homeland Security Departmentsecretary Chad Wolf said in September 2020 that he and Barr had discussed arresting leaders of antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.[137] The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2020 that Barr told federal prosecutors to consider charging violent protestors with plotting to overthrow the US government.[138][139]Barr has sometimes supported controversial or false statements made by Trump.[140] In an August 2020 interview, Trump claimed that a plane full of "thugs in dark uniforms", implying antifa, had recently flown from one unidentified city to another with the intention of fomenting riots. His claim appeared to be based on months-old social media rumors.[141][142] Two days later, Barr asserted he knew that antifa activists “are flying around the country” and “we are following them.”[143]In September 2020, Barr asserted liberals were "projecting," referring to “all this bullshit about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I’ve never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I’m the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it.” During both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump was noncommittal when asked if he would accept election results showing he had lost. Days after Barr's remarks, Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost the 2020 election, to which he replied, "Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation."[144][145][127][146] In the days after his electoral defeat, Trump and his legal team led by Rudy Giuliani pursued an aggressive effort to challenge the results with dozens of lawsuits and numerous false and unsubstantiated assertions revolving around an international communist conspiracy, rigged voting machines and polling place fraud to claim the election had been stolen from Trump.[147][148][149][150][151]On September 3, 2020, Trump ordered Barr to identify “anarchist jurisdictions,” stating in a memorandum, “It is imperative that the federal government review the use of federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”[152] Days later, Barr designated New York City, Seattle and Portland, Oregon as such jurisdictions, suggesting they should lose their federal funding because, “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance.”[153]As baseless claims of voting fraud circulated in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election in which Trump lost,[154] Barr sent a memo to DOJ prosecutors authorizing them to investigate "vote tabulation irregularities" before voting results had been certified, a reversal of long-standing department policy. Richard Pilger, director of the Election Crimes Branch at the DOJ Criminal Division, stepped down from that position in protest hours later.[155] Four days later, sixteen assistant U.S. attorneys of the Branch wrote Barr a letter urging him to rescind the memo because it "thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics."[156]Mueller investigation and reportFurther information: Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019) and Mueller ReportOn January 14, 2019, a day before Barr's confirmation hearing for Attorney General, Barr sent written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the eventual final Mueller report, saying "it is very important that the public and Congress be informed of the results of the special counsel's work ... For that reason, my goal will be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law."[157][158]Upon taking office, Barr refused calls to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation, despite his June 2018 memo arguing that the special counsel had no right to investigate Trump.[87][91]On March 22, 2019, Mueller concluded his special counsel investigation and gave the final report to Barr.[159] On March 24, Barr wrote a four-page letter to Congress describing what he said were the report's principal conclusions: first, that the Special Counsel did not establish conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia's efforts to interfere with the 2016 election; and second, that the Special Counsel made no decision as to whether to prosecute Trump for obstruction of justice, quoting "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein themselves concluded that the evidence did not establish obstruction of justice beyond reasonable doubt, and made the decision not to press the charge; "Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."[160][161][162][163]On March 25, Mueller reportedly wrote a letter to Barr, as described in the New York Times as "expressing his and his team's concerns that the attorney general had inadequately portrayed their conclusions".[164] In USA Today it was described that Mueller "expressed his differences with Barr".[165]On March 27, Mueller sent Barr another letter describing his concerns of Barr's letter to Congress and the public on March 24. In it, Mueller complained that the summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the Special Counsel's probe, adding, "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations".[166] Both before and after the release of Barr's summary, Mueller repeatedly tried to get Barr to release the report's introductions and executive summaries. Mueller's March 27 letter also stated that he had earlier sent a March 25 letter to Barr.[167]Mueller's March 27 letter prompted Barr to call Mueller on March 28. Barr clarified on the intention of his letter both in his phone call with Mueller and in another letter to Congress that his letter had not been intended to be a summary of the report, but rather a description of the principal findings of the report.[168][166]On April 9, Barr appeared in a congressional hearing before the House. There, Representative Charlie Crist described media reports that "members of the special counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter, that it does not adequately or accurately portray the [Mueller] report's findings". Crist asked Barr: "Do you know what they are referencing with that?" Barr replied: "No, I don't. I think – I think – I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries."[169][170] On April 10, Attorney General Barr appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Chris Van Hollen asked Barr regarding obstruction: "Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?" Barr replied: "I don't know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion."[169][170]The Department of Justice released a redacted version of the special counsel's report in the morning of April 18, 2019.[171][172] After the release of the full report, fact-checkers and news outlets characterized Barr's initial letter as a deliberate mischaracterization of the Mueller Report and its conclusions.[173][174][175][176][177][178] The New York Times reported instances in which the Barr letter omitted information and quoted sentence fragments out of context in ways that significantly altered the Mueller findings, including:[173]
Incumbent
Assumed office February 14, 2019
PresidentDonald TrumpDeputyRod RosensteinEd O'Callaghan (acting)Jeffrey A. RosenPreceded byJeff SessionsIn officeNovember 26, 1991 – January 20, 1993
PresidentGeorge H. W. BushDeputyGeorge J. Terwilliger IIIPreceded byDick ThornburghSucceeded byJanet Reno25th United States Deputy Attorney General
In officeMay 26, 1990 – November 26, 1991
PresidentGeorge H. W. BushPreceded byDonald B. AyerSucceeded byGeorge J. Terwilliger IIIUnited States Assistant Attorney Generalfor the Office of Legal Counsel
In officeJanuary 20, 1989 – May 26, 1990
PresidentGeorge H. W. BushPreceded byDouglas KmiecSucceeded byJ. Michael LuttigPersonal details
BornWilliam Pelham BarrMay 23, 1950 (age 70)New York City, New York, U.S.Political partyRepublicanSpouse(s)Christine Moynihan (m. 1973)Children3ParentsDonald BarrMary Margaret AhernRelativesStephen Barr (brother)EducationColumbia University(BA, MA)George Washington University(JD)Signature
Early life and educationBarr was born in New York City in 1950. His father, Donald Barr, taught English literature at Columbia University before becoming headmaster of the Dalton School in Manhattan and later the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, both members of the Ivy Preparatory School League. Barr's mother, Mary Margaret (née Ahern), also taught at Columbia.[9] Barr's father was Jewish and raised in Judaism but later converted to Christianity and joined the Catholic Church. His mother is of Irish ancestry. Barr was raised as a Catholic.[10][11] Barr was the second of four sons, and his younger brother Stephen Barr is a professor of physics at the University of Delaware.[12]Barr grew up on New York City's Upper West Side. As a child he attended a Catholic grammar school, Corpus Christi School, and then the non-sectarian Horace Mann School. After high school, he attended Columbia University, where he majored in government and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1971. He did two additional years of graduate study at Columbia, receiving an Master of Arts in government and Chinese studies in 1973. While at Columbia, Barr opposed anti-Vietnam War occupation protests by students on campus.[13]Barr moved to Washington, D.C., to work as an intelligence analyst for the CIA while taking evening classes at George Washington University Law School, graduating in 1977 with a Juris Doctor with highest honors.[14][15]CareerEarly careerBarr with President Ronald Reaganin the Oval Office in 1983From 1971 to 1977, while attending graduate school and law school, Barr worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).[16] He was first hired as a summer intern for two years.[13] During his law school years he was an analyst in the Intelligence Directorate division from 1973 to 1975, and then transitioning to an assistant in the Office of Legislative Counsel and an agency liaison to Congress from 1975 to 1977.[16][17][18][19]After graduating from law school in 1977, Barr spent one year as a law clerk to Judge Malcolm Wilkey of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.[20][14] He then joined the law firm of Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman) from 1978 to 1982 and again from 1983 to 1989,[20] after serving as Deputy Assistant Director for Legal Policy on the domestic policy staff at the Reagan White House from May 1982 to September 1983.[20][14][21]U.S. Department of JusticeBarr and Dan Quayle watch as President George H. W. Bush signs the Civil Rights Commission Reauthorization Act in the Rose Garden of the White House in 1991.In 1989, at the beginning of his administration, President George H. W. Bush appointed Barr to the U.S. Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), an office which functions as the legal advisor for the President and executive agencies. Barr was known as a strong defender of presidential power.[22] He wrote an advisory opinion justifying the U.S. invasion of Panama and arrest of Manuel Noriega.[22] He wrote legal justifications for the practice of rendition,[23] so that the FBI could enter onto foreign soil without the consent of the host government to apprehend fugitives wanted by the United States government for terrorism or drug-trafficking.[22] Barr declined a congressional request for the full 1989 opinion, but instead provided a document that "summarizes the principal conclusions". Congress subpoenaed the opinion, and its public release after Barr's departure from the Justice Department showed he had omitted significant findings in the opinion from his summary document.[24]U.S. Deputy Attorney General (1990–1991)In May 1990, Barr was appointed Deputy Attorney General, the official responsible for day-to-day management of the Department. According to media reports, Barr was generally praised for his professional management of the Department.[25][26][27]During August 1991, when then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh resigned to campaign for the Senate, Barr was named Acting Attorney General.[28] Three days after Barr accepted that position, 121 Cuban inmates, awaiting deportation to Cuba, seized nine hostages at the Talladega federal prison. He directed the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team to assault the prison, which resulted in rescuing all hostages without loss of life.[29][30]U.S. Attorney General (1991–1993)Official photo of Barr during his first tenure as Attorney GeneralFirst nomination and confirmationIt was reported that President Bush was impressed with Barr's management of the hostage crisis; weeks later, Bush nominated him as Attorney General.[31]Barr enjoyed a "sterling reputation" among Republican and Democratic politicians alike.[32] His two-day confirmation hearing was "unusually placid", and he was received well by both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.[33] Asked whether he thought a constitutional right to privacy included the right to an abortion, Barr responded that he believed the Constitution was not originally intended to create a right to abortion; that Roe v. Wade was thus wrongly decided; and that abortion should be a "legitimate issue for state legislators".[33] "Barr also said at the hearings that Roe v. Wade was 'the law of the land' and claimed he did not have 'fixed or settled views' on abortion."[34] Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joe Biden, though disagreeing with Barr, responded that it was the "first candid answer" he had heard from a nominee on a question that witnesses would normally evade; Biden hailed Barr as "a throwback to the days when we actually had attorneys general that would talk to you."[35] Barr was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee, was confirmed by voice vote by the full Senate,[36][37] and was sworn in as Attorney General on November 26, 1991.[38]First tenureDuring his first tenure as AG, media characterized Barr as "a staunch conservative who rarely hesitates to put his hardline views into action."[39][40][41] He was described as affable with a dry, self-deprecating wit.[39][42] The New York Times described the "central theme" of his tenure to be "his contention that violent crime can be reduced only by expanding Federal and state prisons to jail habitual violent offenders."[40] In an effort to prioritize violent crime, Barr reassigned three hundred FBI agents from counterintelligence work to investigations of gang violence. The New York Times called this move "the largest single manpower shift in the bureau's history."[40]During the 1992 election year, the Wall Street Journal wrote of Barr's work that he "has put a heavy emphasis on attention-grabbing events and pronouncements that may have more to do with presidential election-year politicking than with fighting crime on the streets."[43]The Case for More IncarcerationThe Case for More IncarcerationIn 1992, Barr authored a report, The Case for More Incarceration,[44] which argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate, the creation of a national program to construct more prisons, and the abolition of parole release.[4] Barr argued that incarceration reduced crime, pointing to crime and incarceration rates in 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990. A 1999 criminology study criticized Barr's analysis, saying "so complex an issue as the relationship between crime and punishment cannot be addressed through so simplistic an analysis as a negative correlation between the two very aggregated time series of crime rates and incarceration rates."[45] University of Minnesota criminologist Michael Tonry said the data in Barr's report was deceptively presented; if Barr had chosen five-year intervals, then the data would not have supported Barr's argument, and if Barr had chosen to look at violent crime specifically (as opposed to all crimes as a category), then the data would not have supported his argument.[46]Barr said in the report, "The benefits of increased incarceration would be enjoyed disproportionately by black Americans".[46] In the report, Barr approvingly quoted New Mexico Attorney General Hal Stratton, "I don't know anyone [who] goes to prison on their first crime. By the time you go to prison, you are a pretty bad guy."[47] Barr's report influenced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which aimed to increase the incarceration rate.[4]InvestigationsIn October 1991, Barr appointed then-retired Democratic Chicago judge Nicholas Bua as special counsel in the Inslaw scandal. Bua's 1993 report found the Department of Justice guilty of no wrongdoing in the matter.[48]In October 1992, Barr appointed then retired New Jersey federal judge Frederick B. Lacey to investigate the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency handling of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) Iraqgate scandal.[49] The appointment came after Democrats called for a special prosecutor during the scandal fearing a "cover-up" by the administration. House Banking Committee Chairman Henry B. González called for Barr's resignation, citing "repeated, clear failures and obstruction" by the Department of Justice in allegedly delaying an investigation of the BNL-Iraqgate case.[50][51] González also called for an independent special counsel investigation.[51]Phone surveillance programIn 1992, Barr launched a surveillance program to gather records of innocent Americans' international phone calls.[52] The DoJ inspector general concluded that this program had been launched without a review of its legality.[52] According to USA Today, the program "provided a blueprint for far broader phone-data surveillance the government launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."[52]In December 2019, Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Patrick J. Leahy asked the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate Barr for approving an illegal surveillance program without legal analysis.[53]Iran-ContraIn late 1992, Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, who had been chosen to investigate the Iran–Contra affair, found documents in the possession of Reagan's former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, which Walsh said was "evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public."[54][55] Weinberger was set to stand trial on felony charges on January 5, 1993.[54][56] His "indictment said Mr. Weinberger's notes contradicted Mr. Bush's assertions that he had only a fragmentary knowledge of the arms secretly sold to Iran in 1985 and 1986 in exchange for American hostages in Lebanon."[56][55][57] According to Walsh, then-president Bush might have been called as a witness.[58]On December 24, 1992, during his final month in office, Bush, on the advice of Barr, pardoned Weinberger,[14][59] along with five other administration officials who had been found guilty on charges relating to the Iran–Contra affair.[14][60][61][54] Barr was consulted extensively regarding the pardons, and especially advocated for pardoning Weinberger.[62]Walsh complained about the move insinuating that Bush on Barr's advice had used the pardons to avoid testifying and stating that: "The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."[63] In 2003, he wrote an account of the investigation in his book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.Because of this and Barr's unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into a second scandal known as Iraqgate, New York Times writer William Safire began to refer to Barr as "Coverup-General Barr."[64] Barr, however, responded that he believed Bush had made the right decision regarding that and he felt people in the case had been treated unfairly.[65] Barr said Walsh was a "head-hunter" who "had completely lost perspective."[2]Post-DOJ careerUpon leaving the DOJ in 1993, Barr was appointed by Virginia Governor George Allen to co-chair a commission to implement tougher criminal justice policies and abolish parole in the state.[66][67] Barr has been described as a "leader of the parole-abolition campaign" in Virginia.[68]After leaving the DOJ, he criticized the Clinton administration for being "soft on crime".[69] Barr expressed his opposition to efforts to end mandatory minimum sentencing.[69] In a 1993 op-ed, he wrote, "The notion that there are sympathetic people out there who become hapless victims of the criminal-justice system and are locked away in federal prison beyond the time they deserve is simply a myth."[70][69] In a 1995 essay, Barr rejected that crime was caused by material factors, such as poverty, arguing instead that crime was caused by immorality: "Spending more money on these material social programs is not going to have an impact on crime, and, if anything, it will exacerbate the problem."[70]In 1994, Barr became Executive Vice President and General Counsel of the telecommunications company GTE Corporation, where he served for 14 years. During his corporate tenure, Barr directed a successful litigation campaign by the local telephone industry to achieve deregulation by scuttling a series of FCC rules, personally arguing several cases in the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court.[71][72] In 2000, when GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to become Verizon Communications, Barr became the general counsel and executive vice president of Verizon until he retired in 2008.[73] Barr became a multimillionaire from working in GTE and Verizon. In 2001, Barr's salary was reportedly $1.5 million.[13]From 1997 to 2000, Barr served on the Board of Visitors of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg.[74]In 2009, Barr was briefly of counsel to the firm Kirkland & Ellis. From 2010 until 2017, he advised corporations on government enforcement matters and regulatory litigation; he rejoined Kirkland and Ellis in 2017.[75]From 2009 to 2018, Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner.[76]Comments about the Starr investigation of President ClintonIn March 1998, Barr lambasted the Clinton administration for criticizing Independent Counsel Ken Starr's investigation of the Whitewater controversy, which had shifted towards an investigation of an alleged affair between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.[2] Barr said the criticism appeared "to have the improper purpose of influencing and impeding an ongoing criminal investigation and intimidating possible jurors, witnesses and even investigators."[2]Comments about the Trump administrationOn April 18, 2019, a redactedversion of Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election was released to the public.During the first two years of the Trump presidency, Barr frequently criticized legal challenges against Trump and investigations into the Trump 2016 campaign and presidency.[77][78]In 2017, Barr said there was "nothing inherently wrong" with Donald Trump's calls for investigating Hillary Clinton while the two were both running for president. Barr added that an investigation into an alleged Uranium One controversy was more warranted than looking into whether Trump conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 elections.[79] Barr also said in 2017 that he didn't think "all this stuff" about incarcerating or prosecuting Hillary Clinton was appropriate to say, but added that "there are things that should be investigated that haven't been investigated," although the FBI began investigating the Clinton Foundation and the related Uranium One matter in 2015, followed by investigations by Republican congressional committees.[80][81][82]In February 2017, Barr argued Trump was justified in firing Acting Attorney General Sally Yates over her refusal to defend Executive Order 13769.[83]Barr was publicly critical of the special counsel investigation. In 2017, he faulted Mueller for hiring prosecutors who have contributed to Democratic politicians, saying that his team should have had more "balance," and characterized the obstruction of justice investigation as "asinine" and that it was "taking on the look of an entirely political operation to overthrow the president."[84][85]In June 2018, Barr sent an unsolicited 20-page memo to senior Justice Department officials. He also provided copies to members of Trump's legal team and discussed it with some of them.[86] In his memo, Barr argued that the Special Counsel should not be investigating Trump for obstruction of justice because Trump's actions, such as firing FBI Director James Comey, were within his powers as head of the executive branch.[87][88][89] He characterized the obstruction investigation as "fatally misconceived" and "grossly irresponsible" and "potentially disastrous" to the executive branch.[90][91] The day after the existence of the memo became known, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said "our decisions are informed by our knowledge of the actual facts of the case, which Mr. Barr didn't have."[92]Democrats later characterized the memo as Barr's "job application" for the Attorney General position.[93]Political donationsThe National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) financially assists Republicans in their Senate election contests; in the seven years from 2009 to 2016, Barr gave six donations to the NRSC totaling $85,400. In a five-month period from October 2018 to February 2019, Barr donated five times (around $10,000 every month) for a total of $51,000. When Barr started donating more frequently to the NRSC, it was uncertain whether then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions would remain in his job. Barr continued donating even after Sessions resigned, and after Trump nominated Barr for Attorney General. The donations stopped after Barr was confirmed by the Senate as Attorney General. NRSC refunded Barr $30,000 before his confirmation. Previously in 2017, Barr had said he felt "prosecutors who make political contributions are identifying fairly strongly with a political party".[94]U.S. Attorney General (2019–present)Barr is sworn in as Attorney General by Chief Justice John Roberts in 2019.Second nomination and confirmationOn December 7, 2018, President Donald Trump announced Barr's nomination to succeed Jeff Sessions.[95][96] Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman reported that Trump had sought Barr as chief defense lawyer for Trump regarding the special counsel investigation headed by Robert Mueller after Barr made three positions known. First, Barr supported Trump's firing of Comey on May 9, 2017. Second, he questioned the appointments of some of Mueller's prosecutors due to political donations they had made to the Clinton campaign. Third, he alleged there were conflicts of interest of two appointees to the Special Counsel Team, Jennie Rheeand Bruce Ohr.[97][98][99]Barr meets with the Justice Department leadership.Barr was confirmed as Attorney General on February 14, 2019, by a 54–45 near party-line vote, with Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) as the three Democrats to vote Yea. Republican senator Rand Paul (R-KY) voted No and Richard Burr (R-NC) did not vote.[100][101] Later that day, Barr was sworn-in as the nation's 85th Attorney General by Chief Justice John Roberts in a ceremony at the White House.[102] He is the first person to be appointed to a second non-consecutive term as Attorney General since John J. Crittenden in 1850.[103]Second tenureIn May 2019, three months into his tenure as Attorney General, the Associated Press characterized Barr as a champion and advocate for Trump.[104] Barr had enthusiastically supported Trump's political agenda, misrepresented aspects of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, repeated Trump's talking point that those investigating Trump had engaged in "spying", defied congressional subpoenas, and refused to give Congress an unredacted version of the Mueller report.[104]Under Barr's leadership, the Justice Department changed its position on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Previously the department took the position that the individual mandate provision was unconstitutional, but could be severed from the whole healthcare law. On March 25, the department updated its position to argue that the entire law is unconstitutional.[105] On May 2, the department conducted a filing with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to nullify the entire law, arguing that the removal of the provision on individual mandate results in the entire law becoming unconstitutional.[106]On May 1, 2019, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd told the House Oversight Committee that Barr had instructed Justice Department official John Gore to refuse a subpoena to testify in front of the committee. The committee subpoenaed Gore over the Trump administration's efforts to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 United States Census. The reason for the refusal was that the committee's decision to not allow a Justice Department lawyer to accompany Gore during testimony violated "the confidentiality interests of the Executive Branch" (though a separate room was permitted).[107] In early June the House Oversight Committee moved to hold Barr in contempt of congress for defying a subpoena regarding the efforts to add a citizenship question to the census.[108] In July 2019, the House of Representatives voted 230–198 to hold Barr (and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross) in criminal contempt of Congress, after they failed to produce documents as April 2019 congressional subpoenas mandated. The documents, on the planned (and eventually scrapped) citizenship question in the 2020 census, were withheld due to a "deliberative process" and "attorney-client communications", according to the Justice Department. President Trump also asserted executive privilege over the documents to withhold them from Congress. Only once prior has a sitting Cabinet member been held in criminal contempt of Congress (Eric Holder in 2012). The House instructed the Justice Department to prosecute Barr, but the Department refused.[109][110]Also in July 2019, Barr reportedly made the decision to not bring federal civil rights charges against New York policeman Daniel Pantaleo for causing the death of Eric Garner. In so doing, he overruled the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, which advocated charging Pantaleo, instead agreeing with Justice Department prosecutors from New York.[111]On July 25, 2019, Barr reinstated the death penalty for federal crimes.[112]In December 2019, Barr said that communities that do not show the "respect and support that law enforcement deserves ... might find themselves without the police protection they need."[113] Barr dropped the Department of Justice's case against the police officer who killed Eric Garner in 2014.[13]In February 2020, Senator Lindsey Graham stated that the Justice Department "is receiving information coming out of the Ukraine from" Rudy Giuliani, a personal lawyer to president Donald Trump. Graham had learned from Barr that "they've created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it's verified". A day later, Barr confirmed Graham's account, stating that he had "established an intake process" for information on Ukraine, including from Giuliani, while citing an "obligation to have an open door" policy on receiving information. Giuliani has claimed to have information of improprieties regarding Ukraine for Joe Biden (a former vice president, later a 2020 presidential candidate) and his son Hunter Biden. Giuliani himself is reportedly being investigated by the Justice Department, with two of his associates having been arrested.[114][115][116]In early June 2020, according to reporting by The Washington Post and Fox News, Barr personally ordered that the streets around Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C. should be cleared so that Trump, Barr and other administration officials could stage a photo op in front of St. John's Church. At the time, the streets were occupied by peaceful protesters as part of the George Floyd protests in Washington, D.C. Barr's order resulted in federal law enforcement officers rushing protesters, and employing smoke canisters, pepper balls, riot shields, and batons against the protesters.[117][118] Barr reacted to the incident by falsely claiming that pepper balls (used by law enforcement on protesters) were not chemical irritants (pepper balls contain pelargonic acid vanillylamide, a chemical irritant; while the product's manufacturer, and the Justice Department, both consider pepper balls a chemical irritant).[119] In August 2020, he invoked qualified immunity before a federal court to protect himself from liability in a lawsuit regarding the Lafayette Square incident.[120]As Attorney General, Barr sowed doubt about the integrity of the 2020 election.[121] In a September 2020 interview, Barr falsely asserted the Justice Department had indicted a Texas man for fraudulently completing 1,700 mail-in ballots. There was no such indictment, and the matter actually involved a series of errors by election officials during a county election, rather than fraud.[122] Barr also repeated a claim that foreign adversaries could flood the country with counterfeit ballots to disrupt the election, a threat that experts characterized as nearly impossible to execute.[123][124] Senior American intelligence officials have said there was no evidence any foreign powers intended to manipulate mail-in voting.[125] The day after Barr's interview, the Department of Homeland Security issued an intelligence bulletin warning that Russia is using social media and other venues to promote false claims that mail voting will lead to widespread fraud, in order "to undermine public trust in the electoral process."[126] In a subsequent September 2020 interview, Barr stated that mail-in voting meant “we’re back in the business of selling and buying votes” including “outright coercion, paying off a postman, here’s a few hundred dollars, give me some of your ballots.”[127] On October 1, 2020, more than 1,600 former DOJ attorneys signed an open letter stating, "we fear that Attorney General Barr intends to use the DOJ’s vast law enforcement powers to undermine our most fundamental democratic value: free and fair elections."[128]In mid-June 2020, Barr announced that Geoffrey Berman, the court-appointed United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), "is stepping down". Berman's office had been investigating both Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Trump's inaugural committee, as well as conducting a wider investigation into Trump's company and his associates after successfully prosecuting Michael Cohen, another personal lawyer of Trump.[129] CNN also reported that Berman had prosecuted Halkbank despite Barr's attempt to try to avoid charges for the Turkish state-owned bank, after Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan requested Trump to help drop the charges.[130][131][132][133] Simultaneously, Barr announced that at his recommendation, Trump had appointed Craig Carpenito as the interim SDNY U.S. Attorney, in a departure from the tradition of a career prosecutor from SDNY taking the interim role. Also concurrently, Barr said that Trump would nominate Jay Clayton for the permanent role of SDNY U.S. Attorney.[130][131] Within a day, Berman said that he actually had "not resigned, and have no intention of resigning". Berman also said that he only learned of his supposed departure from Barr's public announcement.[131][132] Barr then informed Berman that Trump had fired Berman at Barr's request. Barr did not give a reason for Berman's firing. As a result of the firing, the deputy SDNY U.S. Attorney, Audrey Strauss, would become the interim SDNY U.S. Attorney. With this, Berman agreed to leave. Meanwhile, the Senate indicated it would not confirm Clayton as the permanent replacement.[133][132]Barr has made commentary about social and religious issues in speeches and television appearances. In an October 2019 address at the University of Notre Dame, Barr asserted that “militant secularists" had been attacking Judeo-Christian values for five decades, stating, "This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secular forces and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia, in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values."[134] In an August 2020 appearance on Fox News, Barr asserted that Black Lives Matter is "a revolutionary group that is interested in some form of socialism, communism. They're essentially Bolsheviks. Their tactics are fascistic." Barr equated the movement with antifa, characterizing that loose collective as "highly organized" and claiming "the media doesn’t take footage of what’s happening" at George Floyd protests. He also claimed that liberals are intent on “tearing down the system” and that the Democratic party was only "interested in total victory. It’s a secular religion. It’s a substitute for a religion."[135] Barr had in June 2020 blamed antifa for orchestrating the George Floyd protests, but analysis by The New York Times found that no one arrested for serious federal crimes at the protests had been linked to antifa.[136] Homeland Security Departmentsecretary Chad Wolf said in September 2020 that he and Barr had discussed arresting leaders of antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement.[137] The Wall Street Journal reported in September 2020 that Barr told federal prosecutors to consider charging violent protestors with plotting to overthrow the US government.[138][139]Barr has sometimes supported controversial or false statements made by Trump.[140] In an August 2020 interview, Trump claimed that a plane full of "thugs in dark uniforms", implying antifa, had recently flown from one unidentified city to another with the intention of fomenting riots. His claim appeared to be based on months-old social media rumors.[141][142] Two days later, Barr asserted he knew that antifa activists “are flying around the country” and “we are following them.”[143]In September 2020, Barr asserted liberals were "projecting," referring to “all this bullshit about how the president is going to stay in office and seize power? I’ve never heard of any of that crap. I mean, I’m the attorney general. I would think I would have heard about it.” During both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump was noncommittal when asked if he would accept election results showing he had lost. Days after Barr's remarks, Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost the 2020 election, to which he replied, "Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation."[144][145][127][146] In the days after his electoral defeat, Trump and his legal team led by Rudy Giuliani pursued an aggressive effort to challenge the results with dozens of lawsuits and numerous false and unsubstantiated assertions revolving around an international communist conspiracy, rigged voting machines and polling place fraud to claim the election had been stolen from Trump.[147][148][149][150][151]On September 3, 2020, Trump ordered Barr to identify “anarchist jurisdictions,” stating in a memorandum, “It is imperative that the federal government review the use of federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”[152] Days later, Barr designated New York City, Seattle and Portland, Oregon as such jurisdictions, suggesting they should lose their federal funding because, “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance.”[153]As baseless claims of voting fraud circulated in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election in which Trump lost,[154] Barr sent a memo to DOJ prosecutors authorizing them to investigate "vote tabulation irregularities" before voting results had been certified, a reversal of long-standing department policy. Richard Pilger, director of the Election Crimes Branch at the DOJ Criminal Division, stepped down from that position in protest hours later.[155] Four days later, sixteen assistant U.S. attorneys of the Branch wrote Barr a letter urging him to rescind the memo because it "thrusts career prosecutors into partisan politics."[156]Mueller investigation and reportFurther information: Special Counsel investigation (2017–2019) and Mueller ReportOn January 14, 2019, a day before Barr's confirmation hearing for Attorney General, Barr sent written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the eventual final Mueller report, saying "it is very important that the public and Congress be informed of the results of the special counsel's work ... For that reason, my goal will be to provide as much transparency as I can consistent with the law."[157][158]Upon taking office, Barr refused calls to recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation, despite his June 2018 memo arguing that the special counsel had no right to investigate Trump.[87][91]On March 22, 2019, Mueller concluded his special counsel investigation and gave the final report to Barr.[159] On March 24, Barr wrote a four-page letter to Congress describing what he said were the report's principal conclusions: first, that the Special Counsel did not establish conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia's efforts to interfere with the 2016 election; and second, that the Special Counsel made no decision as to whether to prosecute Trump for obstruction of justice, quoting "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein themselves concluded that the evidence did not establish obstruction of justice beyond reasonable doubt, and made the decision not to press the charge; "Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense."[160][161][162][163]On March 25, Mueller reportedly wrote a letter to Barr, as described in the New York Times as "expressing his and his team's concerns that the attorney general had inadequately portrayed their conclusions".[164] In USA Today it was described that Mueller "expressed his differences with Barr".[165]On March 27, Mueller sent Barr another letter describing his concerns of Barr's letter to Congress and the public on March 24. In it, Mueller complained that the summary "did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance" of the Special Counsel's probe, adding, "There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations".[166] Both before and after the release of Barr's summary, Mueller repeatedly tried to get Barr to release the report's introductions and executive summaries. Mueller's March 27 letter also stated that he had earlier sent a March 25 letter to Barr.[167]Mueller's March 27 letter prompted Barr to call Mueller on March 28. Barr clarified on the intention of his letter both in his phone call with Mueller and in another letter to Congress that his letter had not been intended to be a summary of the report, but rather a description of the principal findings of the report.[168][166]On April 9, Barr appeared in a congressional hearing before the House. There, Representative Charlie Crist described media reports that "members of the special counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter, that it does not adequately or accurately portray the [Mueller] report's findings". Crist asked Barr: "Do you know what they are referencing with that?" Barr replied: "No, I don't. I think – I think – I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries."[169][170] On April 10, Attorney General Barr appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Senator Chris Van Hollen asked Barr regarding obstruction: "Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?" Barr replied: "I don't know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion."[169][170]The Department of Justice released a redacted version of the special counsel's report in the morning of April 18, 2019.[171][172] After the release of the full report, fact-checkers and news outlets characterized Barr's initial letter as a deliberate mischaracterization of the Mueller Report and its conclusions.[173][174][175][176][177][178] The New York Times reported instances in which the Barr letter omitted information and quoted sentence fragments out of context in ways that significantly altered the Mueller findings, including:[173]
- A sentence fragment described only one possible motive for Trump to obstruct justice, while the Mueller report listed other possible motives
- Omission of words and a full sentence that twice suggested there was knowing and complicit behavior between the Trump campaign and Russians that stopped short of coordination
- Omission of language that indicated Trump could be subject to indictment after leaving office, to suggest that Trump was cleared in full
1994 LaRouche PAC article : "William Barr, the Bush Clique, and Their Friends at Dope, Inc. "
1994 LaRouche PAC article : "William Barr, the Bush Clique, and Their Friends at Dope, Inc. "
https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1994/eirv21n42-19941021/eirv21n42-19941021_029-william_barr_the_bush_clique_and.pdf / 1994-10-21-executive-intel-review-v21-n42-william-barr-and-the-bush-clique.pdf / https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AWBKDbuPh2i6NFqJ276OcZMk3lAJ7Y7u
Two members of George Bush's covert action team, former U.S.Attorney General William Barr and Lt.Col.Oliver North, both plunged into Virginia politics this year.Barr was head of the governor's commission to abolish parole, proposing to make prison inmates slaves under private corpo rate control.North was promoted for the U.S.Senate as a "law and order" candidate.
Oliver North became world famous in the 1980s as a smuggling manager in the Iran-Contra drug-running and gun running affairs.
William Barr, though little known to the public, is a top lawyer for the same criminal covert action team.He was also Attorney General in the Bush administration, when Lyndon LaRouche, then a political prisoner, submitted six volumes of new evidence proving that the government always knew he was innocent, evidence which the Justice Department and the courts refused even to look at.We shall report here on Barr's unusual career, protecting the political and financial managers of the world narcotics trade.
[...]
Blocking the BCCI investigation
Blocking the BCCI investigation
Executives of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) were indicted in October 1988, on charges they conspired with cocaine traffickers to launder millions of dollars in narcotics profits. Forty U.S. and foreign banks, evidently complicit in the international drug trade, were subpoenaed to produce records before a Tampa, Florida grand jury.A majority of those subpoenaed had earlier been named in EIR's best-selling book, Dope, Inc., as among those lead ing British and allied Wall Street banks in the business of washing dope money.
BCCI was further exposed as an instrument for the trans actions of Oliver North and his associates, who had been criminally employed by Vice President George Bush in the Iran and Contra operations.
But George Bush was elected U.S.President just weeks after the BCCI indictments.In December 1989, Bush ordered the U.S.bombing and invasion of Panama, killing thousands. Panamanian Gen. Manuel Noriega, who knew the dirtiest drug-pushing secrets of BCCI, Bush, and North, was kidnapped and imprisoned in Florida.
Under the leadership of Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and William Barr, who was then an official in the Bush Justice Department, the BCCI investigations were stopped.Plea bargains protected the world's top drug bank ers, and protected President Bush and his criminal employee North.In exchange for leniency, officials of BCCI agreed to help Bush prosecute General Noriega for alleged drug trafficking.
Barr, who had a startling private relationship to BCCI, and who had drawn up the spurious legal rationale for the attack on Panama, was then appointed U.S.Attorney Gener al.He reached a final settlement of the BCCI case, foreclosing all further investigations of the BCCI-linked drug apparatus.
Initiation into the Bush team
Initiation into the Bush team
We shall now trace Barr's route to political power, ob serving his early initiation into the Bush covert action machine.
Barr reportedly decided, while still a high school student, that he would one day be the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.He joined the CIA's internship program while he was a Columbia University graduate student in 1971, and went to work full time for the CIA when he left Columbia in 1973.
During his first two years with the Agency, Barr worked for the intelligence directorate in the China department. He would soon cross paths with George Bush,' who went to Beijing in 1974 as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's liaison chief to the Communist Chinese government.
Barr was already in the CIA's legal office in 1976 when Bush became Director of Central Intelligence. Bush promptly brought back assassinations manager Theodore Shackley as associate deputy CIA director for covert operations, along with Shackley's deputy Thomas Clines. Shackley had been the head of the CIA Miami Station in the early 1960s, following the disastrous invasion of Cuba. Shackley and Clines had assembled the Cuban irregulars, who had been trained as assassins and smugglers, into a permanent covert action force. Men like Felix Rodriguez had served under Shackley as he ran the opium-growing projects in Laos and the Operation Phoenix mass murder project in Vietnam.
Shackley's Cubans had turned up as the 1972 Watergate burglars, paid by George Bush's Texas political machine. Shackley would later serve as George Bush's speechwriter in Bush's campaign against Ronald Reagan for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. When Bush got in as vice president instead, Felix Rodriguez and Oliver North together would supervise the Contras' drug running, out of George Bush's vice presidential office.
William Barr joined this team as it matured under George Bush's hand at the CIA. Barr prepared briefs for Bush's stonewalling responses to congressional probes, led by Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis that attempted to bring the Bush and Kissinger covert under the rule of American law.
George Bush made one extraordinary change at the Agency which was never publicized beyond the ranks of the intelligence community. Bush committed the United States to share with Great Britain's secret service the fruits of the U.S. satellite surveillance throughout the world. This action dismayed many in the American service who has seen traitors such as Kim Philby as the very heart of the British Crown's leadership grouping But Bush's official intelligence policy change reflected his deep-seated ties to Britain, from his father, Prescott Bush's, banking partnership with Averell Harriman in British geopolitical schemes from the 1920s to the 1950s. This Anglo-Bush faction of the intelligence community would soon fashion BCCI into a global rime instrument.
Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election, and refused Bush's request to stay Jr as CIA director. Barr was one of the many CIA men who left the Agency after Bush's departure in 1977. Ted Shackley led the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and cdrralled these men into a private intelligence clique around George Bush.
On George Bush's recommendation, the 27-year-old Barr was hired in 1977 as clerk to Federal Circuit Court Judge Malcolm Wilkey. During the 1960s, Wilkey had been general counsel to a copper-mining conglomerate operating in Chile under the political management of Prescott Bush's banking partner, Spruile Braden. Salvador Allende became Chile's President and confiscated Braden's huge El Teniente mine; Allende was soon overthrown and murdered in 1973.
In 1976, Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier had been blown up by a car bomb in Washington, D.C. Though the U.S. media generally blamed the Chilean secret police for the killing, it is well established that then-CIA director George Bush had penetrated the Chilean agency and had squelched all U.S. police investigation into the murder. Barr's new boss, Malcolm Wilkey, later served as George Bush's ambassador to Uruguay and arranged cool-out payments to Chileans who might have fingered Bush's CIA for the Letelier bombing.
Later, in 1992, Chile's Supreme Court decided that Presi dent Bush could be legally ordered to appear in Chile, to testify on the role of the CIA in the Letelier case; Chilean generals claimed they have been wrongly blamed for the killing, and that Bush's CIA ordered the 1976 bombing. The U.S. chief law enforcement officer, Attorney General William Barr, did not respond. But what he did, was to hire Malcolm Wilkey as a special prosecutor to intimidate the Democratic Congress in the House Post Office affair.
On Judge Wilkey's recommendation, Barr started in Oc tober 1978 as an associate of the Washington, D.C. law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge. Barr immediately took up the representation of B.F. Saul II, a Maryland real estate magnate who only a few months earlier had become chairman of Financial General Bankshares. In his later testimony to the Senate hearings on his confirmation for Justice Department posts, Barr revealed that he had represented B.F. Saul beginning November 1978, and in 1979, 1981, and 1982.
This was an extraordinarily important stretch of time in his client's life. During this period, Financial General was taken over in stages by BCCI, a London-based bank with Arab and other principal investors tied to Anglo-American intelligence. Saul's Financial General Bankshares changed its name to First American Bankshares, and functioned as the Maryland, District of Columbia, and Virginia arm of the British spook-bank BCCI.
What did Barr really know about BCCI?
What did Barr really know about BCCI?
A decade later, the worldwide scandal would begin with the British taking regulatory action against BCCI in London. British newspapers called BCCI a front for the CIA. The scandal culminated in the prosecution of the elderly Clark Clifford, who at a certain point replaced Saul as chairman of First American.
In America, much of the scandal centered around the "secret" ownership of First American by the BCCI group of investors, in violation of U.S. banking laws requiring transparency of bank control. William Barr told the Senate that the government could not have prosecuted BCCI earlier, because it had not discovered this secret BCCI involvement in First American until a decade after the fact. But to whom was it secret? Had it really been a secret to Attorney General Barr?
Regardie's magazine of May 1990, quoted Clifford that B.F. Saul "had occasion to go to London, maybe more than once. He had occasion to go to the Middle East, the Persian Gulf countries. I remember later on his talking with me, and he said, 'I have looked into the reputation, particularly of e leader of the group, of His Excellency Sheikh Kamal Adham' [chief of Saudi intelligence]. And he said, 'It's difficult to recall a time when I have heard such universal commendation for an international businessman. I hear it in London. l've heard the most commendatory comments. I've heard about him in the countries of the Persian Gulf. I have not heard one whisper of criticism against this man.' And he said, 'I feel perfectly comfortable about this group, headed by this man, coming in and taking over our banks.' "
Attorney William Bar'r s client during the takeover, B.F. Saul, tried to put a different spin on the matter. He told Regardie's: "I never did go to the Middle East to meet him. I think I met Kamal Adham in Washington once. I don't think I ever met him in London. I met him for 20 minutes. I did not try to make a judgment whether they should own a bank. That was something for the Federal Reserve to do. All I was concerned about was whether this was in the best interest of the shareholders, and I thought it was " (emphasis added).
Barr told the Senate that he had represented B.F. Saul through March 1982. By this time, the BCCI takeover of First American was completed. In April 1982, Clifford re placed B.F. Saul as First American's chairman, although Saul stayed on the board. In May 1982, Barr ceased being a private attorney, and joined the White House legal staff, becoming an intimate collaborator of Vice President George Bush's counsel C. Boyden Gray.
Bush's covert action apparatus
Bush's covert action apparatus
Barr was officially back in government at the precise time that the Bush team was consolidating extraordinary power, and the new BCCI arrangements would be useful for their global offensive.
On May 14, 1982, Vice President Bush's position as chief of all U.S. covert action was formalized in a secret memorandum (signed "for the President" by Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser William P. Clark and declassified during the congressional Iran-Contra hearings). The memo explained that "National Security Decision Direc tive 3, Crisis Management, establishes the Special Situation Group (SSG), chaired by the Vice President. The SSG is charged. . .with formulating plans in anticipation of crises. "
The memo also announced the birth of the Standing Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG),to work as an intelligence-gathering agency for Bush and his SSG. This new subordinate group ,consisting of representatives of Vice President Bush, National Security Council (NSC) staff members, the CIA, the military, and the State Department, was to "meet periodically in the White House Situation Room. " They were to identify areas of potential crisis and "present . . . plans and policy options to the SSG " under Chairman Bush. And they were to provide to Bush and his assistants,"as crises develop, alternative plans," "action/options," and "coordinated implementation plans" to resolve the "crises. "
Finally,the subordinate group was to give to Chairman Bush ami his assistants "recommended security,cover,and media plans that will enhance the likelihood of successful execution. " It was announced that the CPPG would meet for the first time on May 20,1982, and that agencies were to "provide the name of their CPPG representative to Oliver North,NSC staff'; North would henceforth function under Bush's direction in the smuggling of drugs and weapons. Felix Rodriguez,North's cohort in the massive cocaine smuggling of the Contras, began operating through George Bush's office in August 1982, and appeared in Bush's office no later than March 17,1983.
Barr left the administration in September 1983, returning to Shaw,Pittman. Two years later,the illegal shipment of missiles to the Khomeini regime in Iran was planned, officially, at an Aug. 8,1985 meeting of Vice President Bush with the National Security Planning Group in the residence section of the White House.
The work of Bush and his cadres bore fruit in what be came known,years later,as the first transactions of the Iran scandal. The London Financial Times on July 29,1991 described the way BCCI had become a "magnet for covert operations in the 1980s":
"BCCI Used by Iran to Buy U.S. Missiles
"London branches of BCCI were used to finance the export of U. S. anti-tank missiles during [Iran's] war with Iraq.
"The export of the TOW missiles together with other weapons in 1985 was arranged by an Indian-born British arms dealer who figured prominently in the Irangate arms-for-hostages scandal and was wound up in February of this year.
"The man at the center of the deal was Mr. Ben Banerjee, a London-based businessman, who boasted of his links with Col. Oliver North,the disgraced former White House official at the center of Irangate. Mr. Banerjee died of a heart attack in May 1990.
"The . . . $ 18. 8 m[illion] deal in 1985 . . . was disguised as a shipment of' I ,250 lift trucks'. . . .
"Mr. Arthur Liman, former chief counsel of the Senate's Iran-Contra committee . . . told the FinanciaL Times that Mr. Adnan Khashoggi,the Saudi arms dealer who was one of the main figures in the scandal, made payments from his ac counts at the BCCIto the Enterprise Fund [of Oliver North] . . .
"The story of how Mr. Ba erjee . . . arranged for the shipment of arms . . . provides a revealing insight into the way in which [BCCI] became a ragnet for covert operations in the 1980s. . . . A U. S. investigator said . . . BCCI could have been involved in the begin ing and the end of the TOW missile transactions.
According to the document ,some of the weapons were shipped through Poland. "
Barr in power
Barr in power
As a member of the Bush team since 1976, Barr was the first Assistant Attorney GeJeral installed at the Justice Department after Bush's 1988 election to the presidency. He was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel. During one late night session,Barr drafted the brief justifying the kidnapping of Panama's General Noriega; he also supplied legal pretexts for the bombing and invasion of Iraq. Barr further developed the astonishing legal theory,which came to be known as the Thornburgh Doctrine, that the FBI could kidnap people in foreign countries, even against those countries' laws and regardless of U . S. obligations under international law. Some congressmen were reportedly angry with Barr for keeping confidential the text of the brief upon which this legal doctrine was based.
In May 1990, Barr was elevated to Deputy Attorney Gen eral, was in charge of the day-to-day management of the Justice Department. As a Bush insider, Barr gradually took over much of the power of his nominal boss,the discredited Attorney General Thornburgh. In August 1991, Thornburgh resigned; Barr became acting Attorney General and was soon officially nominated for the post.
In his Senate confirmation hearings, Barr was asked by Sen. Strom Thurmond (R- S.C.), "What are your goals during your tenure as Attorney General?"
In reply, Barr first made it clear that an attack on the leadership of the world narcotics trade, or any top-down approach to the drug problem, was strictly ruled out: "Obvi ously, drugs has to continue as a top priority. In my view, it is a long-term struggle. We are talking here about the cold war. We are not talking about Desert Storm. This problem took decades to come about, and it is going to take decades to cure. But part of my responsibility and my priority will be to keep the pressure on, so we continue to make progress."
What progress? The money-laundering bankers, the co vert-action drug smugglers, and the corrupters of the security and military services, are all untouchable by law enforcement, because they are "gentlemen and men of distinction" for Barr [...].
What did Barr have in mind, when he told the senators that he would be "attacking criminal organizations"? It was not the Dope, Inc. apparatus, which criminally employs and feeds the drugs to America's youth. Rather,Barr would tar get the street-level criminals. He was crudely hyping up vic tims of violent crime, speaking of "street gangs, many of which are involved in drug trafficking themselves,and I think there are some initiatives we can take in that area. We are focusing . . . more on those kinds of organizations like the Cripps and the Bloods. You may have read about the FBI anti-gang squad that was established in Washington, and I think you will be seeing more of that nationwide.
"[Then there is] the problem of career criminals, armed career criminals. We have strong firearm statutes . . . and we are seeking some additional statutes and we realize that a very high proportion of violent crime is committed by a very small group, a cohort of hardened criminals, career criminals,and we can use the firearm laws to apprehend these individuals and put them away in federal prison for long periods of time."
How the dope trade was saved
How the dope trade was saved
Just before Bush's 1988 election to the presidency, as the Iran-Contra scandals continued to boil,executives of BCCI were indicted for conspiracy to launder millions in cocaine profits.
Recently a former high-level U.S. government official with intimate knowledge of the BCCI case told EIR that the Reagan-Bush-era CIA had initiated the bank's trafficking in drugs and arms. This source said that the CIA had assured BCCI associates that these practices were in accord with U.S. national security. Here was the operation of the Bush "Special Situation" executive, briefly thrown into public view with the BCCI indictments,
The records of at least 40 banks were subpoenaed in connection with BCCI's drug-money laundering, including Bank of America, which helped finance the founding of BCCl's start-up company, and at one point owned 30% of BCCI. Customs agents scrutinized Bank of America ac counts used by people linked to Roberto Alcaino, a Colom bian arrested in 1988 in New York on cocaine-smuggling charges. Alcaino was named in BCCI indictments as "a major trafficker" of cocaine to New York, Los Angeles, and Chica go. Executives of BCCI allegedly helped him launder his profits.
Other major banks targeted by the federal probe included:
Marine Midland Bank, since 1978 owned by the Hong kong and Shanghai Banking Corp., so notorious since the British Opium Wars of the nineteenth century as a drug bank, that the New York State Banking Commission blocked its buyout of Marine Midland;
Republic National Bank, the New York City flagship firm of Israeli mafia figure Edmond Safra, whose banking empire stretches from the eastern Mediterranean to lbero-America;
Bank of Nova Scotia, the Canadian banking giant, which was identified in EIR's Dope, Inc. as the institution that opened up the Caribbean as an offshore money-laundering center,in collusion with the Meyer Lansky syndicate;
Another Florida bank subpoenaed, Dadeland Bank, was owned by a group of anti-Noriega Panamanians.
But these investigations were sabotaged and shut down. And in December 1991, Attorney General Barr announced that BCCI had entered a guilty plea to certain racketeering charges, in return for which the U.S. Justice Department agreed to drop all other federal and state charges that might be brought against BCCI entities in the future. In the plea bargain arrangement,BCCI forfeited all of its estimated $550 million assets in the United States, and there were some minor jail sentences. But the global drug apparatus, which had for a time been publicly challenged, was safe.
REFERENCES
REFERENCES
ETC
ETC
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2019/apr/16/cia-barr-crest/
A memo uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives shows that during his time at the CIA’s Office of Legislative Council, current Attorney General William P. Barr drafted letters calling for the end of the moratorium on destroying records imposed on the Agency ahead of the Church Committee hearings.
2019-01-11-city-journal-org-if-confirmed-ag-barr-reputation.pdf ( https://www.city-journal.org/william-barr-attorney-general-nominee )
What would William Barr do if he is confirmed as attorney general and confronted with a repetition of the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when Richard Nixon tried to save his presidency by ordering his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor investigating him? Would he be willing to shut down special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation?
After meeting with him earlier this week, Senator Lindsey Graham said that Barr had assured him that he would let Mueller complete his inquiry into Russia’s election-meddling. That view was widely echoed by those who know Barr well. “The man I know would never be swayed by undue political pressure—from editorial boards, the Congress, or a president,” said Paul Cappuccio, a former executive vice president and general counsel of Time Warner. “He’ll be his own man,” said Michael Kelly, who worked with Barr when he came to GTE as general counsel and executive vice president. “Anyone who knows my father knows he’s the wrong man to try to bully,” said Margaret “Meg” Barr, at 34 the youngest of his three daughters, all lawyers with public-service jobs.
Barr was well regarded during his first stint as attorney general under President George H. W. Bush between 1991 and 1993, but critics argue that his overly expansive view of executive power and defense of Trump in a 19-page unsolicited memo to the Justice Department and to Trump’s lawyers raise questions about his fitness for the job. Many insist that Barr should recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller inquiry as a condition of confirmation, though Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has said that the memo had “no impact” on the Mueller probe.
In our interviews last month in Washington, Barr refused to discuss either his confirmation hearings, which begin on January 15, or his only meeting with Trump, in December, which one White House official described as a “candid” 90-minute encounter, though Trump reportedly did not ask how Barr would handle the Mueller inquiry. During a wide-ranging interview and at a dinner with his family, Barr did discuss his personal and professional life. He and Christine, a retired librarian, have been married 45 years. His eldest daughter, Mary, 41, is a senior Justice Department official who now oversees the department’s anti-opioid and addiction efforts in Rosenstein’s office; Patricia, 37, is counsel for the House Agriculture Committee; and Meg, a former Washington prosecutor and cancer survivor, is now counsel for Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana.
Barr, 68, clearly wants the attorney general job. “Our institutions matter,” he said, without elaboration. He does not seem to fear his confirmation turning into an ugly, partisan brawl that could sully his reputation. Meg’s cancer battle took care of that. “If it’s not about my daughter’s being mortally ill, it’s nothing,” he said softly in the living room of the new house in McLean, Virginia, that he helped design. “Meg’s illness changed our family. It changed me.”
The second of four sons, William Pelham Barr grew up on New York’s Upper West Side. His father became headmaster at Dalton, the elite New York prep school, where his college-educated mother taught English to foreign students. Barr’s values were ingrained early in life—conservative politics and Catholicism—and have never wavered. At Corpus Christi, his Roman Catholic elementary school, he supported Richard Nixon. (A nun took him aside and promised to pray for him.) Even in high school at Horace Mann, the most competitive nonsectarian (but largely Jewish) prep school in New York, Barr stood out. “He wanted to be respected as a conservative intellectual more than liked,” recalled Doug Schoen, the Democratic pollster and a fellow student there. “He made it known that he took his intellectual inspiration not from Allard Lowenstein, the Pied Piper of the anti-war movement, but William Buckley.” This predilection for early decisions applied to avocations as well. At age eight, Barr took up the bagpipes, and has since played competitively in Scotland and at family events.
Barr told his high school guidance counselor that he wanted to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, said Robert Kimmitt, a Republican friend of 40 years who has also held several senior government posts. While most aspiring analysts studied Russian during the Cold War, Barr got a master’s degree at Columbia in Chinese—“the other enemy,” as he put it. Between 1973 and 1977, he worked as a CIA analyst while attending night law school at George Washington. As a junior specialist in China, he occasionally was asked to backstop CIA director, George H.W. Bush, a former U.S. ambassador to China, at congressional hearings. The connection proved useful.
Barr’s faith and commitment to service have taken priority, his family told me, whether he was working in government or in the private sector as executive vice president and general counsel of Verizon. He has long served on the board of the Archdiocese’s Inner-City Scholarship Fund in New York, raising money for Catholic schools and causes. Friends told me that for many years he has paid the tuition of some 18 students a year at a parochial school in New York, costing him about $50,000 a year.
Perhaps the pivotal day in the Barr’s life was July 17, 2012, when he and Meg learned that her Hodgkin’s lymphoma had relapsed. Though 92 percent of Hodgkin’s cases are cured, only 17 percent of patients whose cancer returns survive. “It was the worst day of my life,” Meg told me. They reacted with resolve, not panic, reading studies, questioning researchers, and examining the results of experimental treatments. “We were like two lawyers preparing a legal brief,” she recalled.
They also prayed. Barr asked the nuns at convents he helps support in Illinois and Virginia to pray for his daughter. He also sought help from a rabbi who sent Meg a book of prayers. His own father, though a Catholic convert, was born a Jew. “So I wanted to cover all the bases,” he said.
When they chose Dana Farber Cancer Institute for Meg’s chemo and stem-cell transplant, Barr suspended work at his law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, and moved with his wife to Boston to be close to her. “He never missed a chemo or radiation treatment, a test or a scan,” she said, calling him her “cancer concierge.” When Meg needed to be isolated after her stem-cell transplant, Barr rented a house in Scituate, outside Boston, where they walked on the beach and read books together. They talked about a future neither was certain she would have. “Those three months were best and worst of times,” she recalled.
Against the odds, Meg recovered. “The hardest part of my illness was accepting the randomness of it, the fact that you can’t control the outcome,” she said. “Both my father and I tend to be control freaks.”
Last December, days after President Trump announced his intention to nominate Barr as attorney general, he walked Meg down the aisle of St. Peter’s, their local parish church. He even persuaded the priests to let bagpipes play at the wedding ceremony.
In 1991, after only two days before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barr’s nomination as attorney general was approved unanimously, by voice vote. He won praise for his candor from Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden for admitting that he believed the Constitution had not created a right to abortion, and that abortion, though now settled law since Roe v. Wade, should be a “legitimate issue for state legislators.”
His second confirmation hearing will surely prove more contentious, especially given Barr’s longstanding endorsement of broad presidential powers. When Barr headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 1989, he deemed legal the invasion of Panama and the arrest of longtime U.S. ally Manuel Noriega and argued that the Bush administration could arrest terrorists and drug traffickers overseas, even in violation of international law. As deputy attorney general in 1990, he advised that President Bush could legally wage war against Iraq, without Congress’s approval, though he encouraged Bush to seek a congressional resolution of support to strengthen his political position. Barr is therefore likely to support the issuing of presidential pardons to loyalists. Long a champion of tough-on-crime policies and of tighter immigration controls, he is also likely to embrace former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s agenda on both, perhaps even including the legality of separating parents from children at the U.S. southern border.
But it is the Mueller investigation that will draw the sharpest inquiry. Barr’s memo argues that a president cannot be accused of obstructing justice unless he destroys evidence, urges a witness to lie, or deliberately takes other actions “to block or hinder an investigation.” He has criticized Mueller for appointing so many Democratic investigators for his probe. In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed, he argued that Trump “made the right call” by firing James Comey as head of the FBI, and last year he told the New York Times that there was more justification to investigate Hillary Clinton’s role in the sale of uranium to Russia than Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia. Senator Dianne Feinstein has called such views “troubling.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to use the confirmation hearings to force Barr to pledge that Mueller’s inquiry will proceed unimpeded, and that Congress and the public will see the final Mueller report.
In his highly qualified, unenthusiastic endorsement of Barr, Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, called the nominee “as good as we’re likely to get,” arguing that “all the features that make Barr attractive also make him scary.” But Wittes is also encouraged by reports that Barr and Mueller have known and respected one another for years. Senator Graham, one of Trump’s most ardent champions, also stressed Barr’s respect for Mueller, who was assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division under Barr.
“Trump may believe that Barr will do his bidding, but that’s wrong,” said Schoen. “Notwithstanding his memo, what Barr’s history tells you is that he won’t bend or fold for Trump. His personal and professional record suggest that he will do what he considers legally right and ethical.”
In a recent episode of The Lawfare Podcast, former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara argued that Barr’s decisions as attorney general, if he is confirmed, will either burnish or tarnish what is now a sterling reputation. Barr, in sum, has little to gain, but much to lose. That may well be his best qualification for the job.
Year 1997 at GTE (summary provided mid-1998) - Conrades listed
Year 1997 at GTE (summary provided mid-1998) - Conrades listed
1998 Report - Annual Summary for GTE for the year 1997
[William Pelham Barr (born 1950)] Executive Vice President – Government and Regulatory Advocacy and General Counsel
[George Henry Conrades (born 1939)], Executive Vice President of GTE and President, GTE Internetworking
1998 - (May 10)
1998 - (May 10)
Full newspaper page - [HN01EU][GDrive]
wow - MCi-Worldcom eventually failed due to a scandal, and were bought by Verizon anyways! Mentioned - William Pelham Barr (born 1950)
See MCI WorldCom Corporation .
The 40-Year War
The 40-Year War
William Barr’s long struggle against congressional oversight
2019-09-19-prospect-org-40-year-war-bill-barr-oversight.pdf
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See
BY BRAD MILLER SEPTEMBER 9, 2019
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JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AP PHOTO
Attorney General William Barr in 2019
This article is a preview of the Fall 2019 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
I have Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” Donald Trump said in a recent speech to a far-right-wing campus organization. Trump is not a constitutional scholar, and he would not care at all about “constitutional architecture” were he not president. So where did this sweeping claim to executive power come from?
Trump's claims are largely motivated by self-interest, as all of Trump's motivations begin with "self,” rather than any doctrinal belief. Congressional investigations may expose his venality and perhaps criminality, so Trump will fight them tooth and nail.
But for Trump's attorney general, William Barr, and others on the right, the effort to take power for the president from the courts and especially from Congress has been a 40-year project. Barr and his comrades may find statements like “I have Article II” crass and narcissistic, but in their view Trump is generally correct. Executive power maximalists argue that the “original intent” of the framers of the Constitution was to create a strong president with concentrated power and a largely advisory Congress.
The historical evidence for that argument is exceedingly thin.
Yet Trump and Barr alike will adopt any means necessary to defeat challenges to presidential power, which even includes false testimony under oath by senior administration officials in judicial proceedings, as was the case in the failed effort to justify a citizenship question on the 2020 census. The claim to presidential power that may be most dangerous to democracy is the power to ration information to Congress and the American people. Neither Congress nor the courts nor voters can effectively check power abused in secret. And Congress's power to require information from the president may be the power most difficult to reclaim if Congress yields that power in a tactical retreat in advance of the 2020 election.
For Barr, this central confrontation with Congress over Congress's power to investigate represents unfinished business.
AN ABUNDANT BODY OF LAW and democratic thought, some eloquently stated, supports the power of Congress to inform itself and the American people. Congress first demanded information from the executive branch in George Washington’s first term, after a disastrous military expedition to the nation’s far-western frontier, Ohio. Many members of Congress, such as Representative James Madison, had been delegates to the Constitutional Convention and knew the framers’ “original intent.”
“The power of inquiry has been employed by Congress throughout our history,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in 1959, “over the whole range of the national interests concerning which Congress might legislate or decide upon due investigation not to legislate; it has similarly been utilized in determining what to appropriate from the national purse, or whether to appropriate. The scope of the power of inquiry, in short, is as penetrating and far-reaching as the potential power to enact and appropriate under the Constitution.”
A prominent American political scientist, Woodrow Wilson, said that the “informing function of Congress should be preferred even to its legislative function.” Congress's “proper duty,” Wilson said, is “to look diligently into every affair of government and to talk much about what it sees. It is meant to be the eyes and the voice, and to embody the wisdom and will of its constituents.” If Congress is derelict in that duty, then “the country must be helpless to learn how it is being served.”
The Reagan administration upended this rough consensus, bringing in a cadre of rightist lawyers to the Justice Department and the White House with what were then seen as fringe views on presidential power. (To most legal scholars, those views are still fringe.) Barr was one of their number. Barr worked in the White House on legal policy for 16 months in Reagan's first term.
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SCOTT APPLEWHITE/AP PHOTO
1982: William Barr was one of a group of lawyers working in the Reagan and Bush administrations who held fringe views on presidential power.
The lawyers favored a much stronger presidency. They argued that the presidency had been stripped of proper constitutional powers in the aftermath of Watergate, but their proposals went well beyond reversal of post-Watergate reforms. Edwin Meese, the attorney general and most influential lawyer in the Reagan administration, questioned the constitutionality of independent agencies and suggested that the president could disregard Supreme Court decisions with which the president disagreed.
They decided to challenge Congress's oversight power. Two House committees began an investigation into alleged political interference in enforcement and spending by the Environmental Protection Agency under the Superfund Act. President Reagan claimed executive privilege and directed EPA not to produce subpoenaed documents. The House held the EPA director, Anne Gorsuch Burford (Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch's mother), in contempt.
DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued an opinion that DOJ need not prosecute criminal contempt of Congress charges that the House referred, despite statutory language that they must. Armed with that opinion, DOJ refused to prosecute. It apparently dawned on Burford that the lawyers in the White House and DOJ who wanted the fight with Congress did not risk jail time—but she did. Unnamed Burford aides told reporters that Burford wanted to provide subpoenaed documents to Congress, but Reagan ordered her to stand down.
Career EPA employees leaked damaging evidence of misconduct by Burford's leadership team. Representative John Dingell, the fiercest practitioner of congressional oversight in American history, said his committee had evidence of criminal conduct at EPA. Burford fired Rita Lavelle, the head of the Superfund program. Lavelle was later convicted of perjury in the House investigation.
The fight against the congressional investigation of the Superfund program unraveled. Reagan agreed to produce all of the subpoenaed documents with minor redactions in what the House committees made public, and the House agreed to drop the contempt charge against Burford. While Reagan said publicly that Burford could stay in her job as long as she wanted it, unnamed aides told reporters that she should resign. Burford responded by resigning, so EPA could perform its important work without distraction, she said.
It would get worse for the Reaganite effort to defeat congressional oversight. The House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into whether the DOJ had obstructed the congressional investigation into the Superfund program. The committee questioned whether DOJ should have the power both to advise the administration to disobey congressional subpoenas and to decide whether to prosecute criminal contempt of Congress.
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OFFICIAL PORTRAIT
1988: Chief Justice William Rehnquist dealt a blow to the Reaganites when he upheld the constitutionality of the independent counsel law in his Morrison v. Olson opinion.
DOJ provided the committee some documents, but the committee later obtained more revealing documents that the Justice Department had not disclosed. The committee demanded the appointment of an independent counsel for possible criminal charges against Theodore Olson, the former head of OLC (and later the Republican lawyer in Bush v. Gore), for obstruction of the committee’s investigation and for perjury. Independent counsels had all of the investigative and prosecutorial powers that DOJ had, and could not be fired without good cause.
To Reaganites, every syllable of the independent counsel law was an unconstitutional encroachment on presidential power. Their overarching legal theory was the “unitary executive,” a phrase snatched from one of The Federalist Papers that explained why the Constitution did not give executive powers to a committee, as many favored. Reaganites argued that the Constitution granted all executive power to a single official, the president, and any attempt by Congress or the courts to limit that power, or to assign any executive function to anyone else, was unconstitutional.
Their legal theories were put to the test in the Olson case. The law at the time had a hair-trigger requirement to refer evidence of criminal misconduct by senior government officials to outside counsel. Meese did so, and the appointed independent counsel issued subpoenas to Olson and others. Olson filed a lawsuit to quash the subpoena and to declare the independent counsel law unconstitutional. The Reagan administration supported the lawsuit, Morrison v. Olson, which reached the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion, finding no problem with anything in the independent counsel law. The opinion stated that “the conflicts of interest that could arise in situations when the Executive Branch is called upon to investigate its own high-ranking officers” justified the procedures established by the law. But Rehnquist did not limit the decision to those circumstances. The opinion quoted accounts that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention seriously considered giving the Senate the power to appoint executive branch officials as a check on the president, a far cry from the argument that the “original intent” of the framers of the Constitution was to create a powerful “unitary executive.” Rehnquist's opinion relied on a 1935 Supreme Court decision, Humphrey's Executor v. United States, which approved the independence of the Federal Trade Commission, a decision that Reaganites hoped the Court would reverse.
The sole dissenter was Antonin Scalia, who described Morrison v. Olson years later as the “most wrenching” case in his time on the Court. “To take away the power to prosecute from the president and give it to somebody who’s not under his control is a terrible erosion of presidential power,” Scalia said. “And it was wrenching not only because it came out wrong—I was the sole dissenter—but because the decision was written by Rehnquist, who had been head of the Office of Legal Counsel, before me, and who I thought would realize the importance of that power of the president to prosecute.”
Rehnquist addressed Scalia's dissent in a three-sentence footnote, saying that Scalia's argument required a “rigid demarcation” of presidential power, “a demarcation incapable of being altered by law in the slightest degree.”
REAGANITES HAD THEIR ASSES handed to them in their fights with Congress, but William Barr wanted no truce.
Barr followed Rehnquist, Scalia, and Olson as head of OLC at the beginning of the George H.W. Bush presidency in 1989, less than a year after the Supreme Court decided Morrison v. Olson. OLC supposedly provides detached legal advice to the president and the executive branch, and advises when proposed policies or actions cross constitutional red lines.
But OLC can also contrive arguments that the law allows or even requires whatever the president wants to do. It is almost impossible for a later administration to prosecute an employee of the federal government, civilian or military, for illegal actions, as long as OLC advised that the actions were legal at the time. In effect, OLC can pardon acts not yet committed. OLC's power obviously can be abused, but it's not always possible to know when or how that occurs, because OLC opinions are often secret, as is the conduct that OLC opinions approve.
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JOE MARQUETTE/AP PHOTO
1992: Edwin Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, with Reagan’s defense secretary Casper Weinberger, who was indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal. In the last month of his presidency, George H.W. Bush pardoned Weinberger, at the suggestion of his attorney general, William Barr.
Barr wrote and circulated throughout the executive branch a militant memorandum entitled “Common Legislative Encroachments on Executive Branch Authority.” The memo called for aggressive challenges to Congress’s claims to authority: “Only by consistently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can executive branch prerogatives be preserved.”
The memo treated the decision in Morrison v. Olson as narrowly limited to prosecution of senior executive branch officials, despite Rehnquist’s broad language. “The President,” Barr said, “as the head of a unitary executive branch, has a duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’ to coordinate and supervise his subordinates, and to ensure that the executive branch speaks with one voice.”
According to Barr, the president alone decided what information Congress should have about executive functions. Statutory “dual reporting requirements” that executive branch agencies provide Congress the same budget requests and legislative proposals that agencies send within the executive branch constituted an unconstitutional “effort to insert [Congress] into the executive branch decisionmaking process.” Executive branch agencies should interpret any such statutory requirement “as applying only to ‘final' recommendations that have been reviewed and approved by the appropriate superiors within the executive branch.”
Barr wrote that Congress's demands for information about “the most sensitive executive branch information … should be resisted … as an unconstitutional encroachment on the President's constitutional responsibility to protect certain information.” Furthermore, he made this broad claim of power to control information: “The President must retain the authority to withhold in the public interest information whose disclosure might significantly impair the conduct of foreign relations, the national security, the deliberative processes of the executive branch or the performance of its constitutional duties.”
The bread and butter of congressional oversight of the executive branch is to examine executive branch actions and the reasons for those actions. According to Barr, none of that is any of Congress's business.
TO BARR, THE IRAN-CONTRA SCANDAL was an executive powers issue. The scandal began in the Reagan administration and consumed much of the Bush 41 administration.
The initial scandal involved the secret sale of weapons to Iran and the use of the proceeds to fund an anti-communist insurgency in Nicaragua, the Contras. Both sales of weapons to Iran and aid to the Contras were forbidden by legislation. Barr regarded the legislation as unconstitutional, describing attempts by Congress to “insert itself in the area of foreign affairs at the expense of the authority traditionally exercised by the President” as an encroachment on the president's powers.
The House select committee that investigated the transactions issued a scathing bipartisan report. The report found that a “cabal of zealots” with “disdain for the law” violated the statutes that forbade the transactions. The Reagan administration had one important ally in Congress: Representative Dick Cheney from Wyoming. Cheney said that the participants in the Iran-Contra transactions properly ignored the statutes. “Judgments about the Iran-Contra affair ultimately must rest upon one's views about the proper roles of Congress and the President in foreign policy,” Cheney wrote in a minority report.
The prosecutions of Iran-Contra defendants were not for violation of the statutes that forbade the transactions, but for the cover-up. Two of Reagan's national security advisors, the assistant secretary of state, and high-ranking officials of the Central Intelligence Agency were convicted of charges that included perjury and false statements, destroying or withholding evidence, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy.
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MAUREEN KEATING/CQ ROLL CALL VIA AP IMAGES
1992: Representative Dick Cheney argued that the Iran-Contra perticipants were right to ignore the statutes.
Shortly before the 1992 election, the grand jury indicted Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's secretary of defense, on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. On Christmas Eve, with less than a month of his presidency left, Bush pardoned Weinberger and five other participants already convicted in the scandal. Both Bush and Barr, who by then was attorney general, said the pardons were Barr's idea.
“The Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed,” said the special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra case, Lawrence Walsh. Barr said that “people in this Iran-Contra matter have been prosecuted for the kind of conduct that would not have been considered criminal or prosecutable by the Justice Department.” Neither Barr nor Walsh concealed their mutual animosity.
BARR DID NOT SERVE IN the George W. Bush administration, but his Iran-Contra ally, Vice President Cheney, carried on the fight for expansive presidential power. The Bush administration claimed the power to ignore hundreds of laws enacted by Congress and signed by the president, in “signing statements” appended to newly enacted legislation, and in OLC opinions for laws already on the books. Congress could override a veto, but not a signing statement or an OLC opinion.
Bush claimed the power to ignore laws like those that forbade the Iran-Contra transactions. He signed an appropriation to support the government of Colombia in the fight against Marxist guerrillas, but issued a signing statement that he could ignore the provision that forbade combat operations by U.S. troops. He signed an appropriation to combat terrorism, but issued a signing statement that he could ignore the provisions that forbade the diversion of funds from authorized programs to secret programs, such as “black sites” where suspected terrorists were held.
An OLC opinion claimed the power to conduct warrantless wiretaps, despite a 1978 law, and signing statements for new legislation claimed the power to ignore limits on surveillance set by Congress. Bush claimed the power to ignore laws that forbade “enhanced interrogation” techniques, practices regarded in international law as torture.
Bush claimed the power to fire executive branch employees who leaked information to Congress, despite statutory whistleblower protections. He claimed the power to ignore requirements to provide information and reports to congressional oversight committees.
Oversight provisions of the Patriot Act required the president to inform Congress how the FBI used new powers to conduct secret searches and to seize documents held by others, to prevent abuse of the statute. “The executive branch shall construe the provisions … that call for furnishing information to entities outside the executive branch,” a signing statement said of the act's requirement to provide information to Congress, “… in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch and to withhold information.” Bush said he would withhold information if he thought disclosure would “impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties,” language almost identical to Barr's 1989 OLC memo.
The claim of presidential power to ignore laws enacted by Congress was a considered, systematic effort to expand the power of the president at the expense of the powers of Congress and of the courts. The effort was largely successful.
DEMOCRATS WON CONTROL OF the House in the 2006 election and I became the chairman of the House Science Committee’s Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee for the last two years of the Bush presidency. We were much more aggressive than most oversight subcommittees. But when the Bush administration used any means necessary to defeat our oversight, they succeeded.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, issued a report on data mining programs at five federal agencies. The report found that none of the programs complied with federal legal requirements for privacy safeguards and data security. The programs were initially intended to identify noncitizens with possible ties to terrorist organizations who applied for visas to enter the United States, but they had grown.
The FBI's program, in particular, sounded suspiciously like the Defense Department's controversial Total Information Awareness program, for which Congress eliminated funding in 2003. Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the program sounded too Orwellian for Democrats and Republicans alike. The FBI's program would collect and correlate information to “identify relationships between individuals, locations, and events that may be indicators of terrorist or other activities of interest.” Identifying possible “sleeper cells” of terrorists would undoubtedly be helpful to law enforcement, but security experts outside of government were skeptical of “predictive” data mining. There were concerns about privacy and civil liberties, data security, and whether a flood of false positives would be more distracting to law enforcement than helpful. I was not reflexively opposed to the program, but I wanted to know more.
Jim Sensenbrenner, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, and I wrote GAO on June 5, 2007, to ask for more information about the FBI's program. John Tierney, the chair of the relevant subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, joined our request.
We wanted to know what information would be collected. The FBI said that the program would collect approximately six billion “records,” but did not say what kinds. We asked how data would be analyzed to identify suspicious conduct, and what was considered suspicious. We asked if the information collected and analyzed would include information about American citizens, and how the program would meet privacy requirements under federal law. Since the FBI sought $12 million in appropriations for the program, to pay for 90,000 square feet of office space and a total staff of 59, our request was well within congressional oversight power. In addition, federal information technology programs had an abysmal history—an FBI computer consultant had recently hackedinto the records of the FBI’s witness protection program—and the FBI’s history of surveillance of civil rights activists, among others, was worse.
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RON EDMONDS/AP PHOTO
2003: As George W. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney served in an administration that continued the fight for expansive presidential power.
DOJ officials ignored repeated requests by GAO to discuss the program. When DOJ officials finally met with GAO investigators, the meeting was brief and belligerent. DOJ officials claimed that GAO's request for information involved a national security program, which was “exempt” from GAO's jurisdiction. That was not true. GAO's jurisdiction is the same as Congress's. GAO has employees with the highest security clearances and routinely reviews the most sensitive information on Congress's behalf. GAO's capacity to handle national security information was in fact why we asked GAO to conduct the inquiry instead of subcommittee staff. Later, DOJ said that there were no “written plans” that would answer our questions because the program was not yet operational, which was not at all credible.
The power of the purse is Congress's foundational constitutional power. We wrote Dave Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, asking to eliminate funding for the program from DOJ's appropriation. Obey, an inveterate civil libertarian and skeptic of the executive branch, obliged. I expected that DOJ would relent, provide the information that we wanted, and we would restore the program's funding. Instead, the elimination of the program's funding went through the House and the Senate without discussion and was signed into law by the president. We never heard about the program again.
Did we really kill the program? Almost certainly not. The Bush administration claimed the power to divert funds appropriated by Congress from approved programs to secret programs not approved or even forbidden by Congress. DOJ almost certainly moved the program to a “dark” part of the FBI's budget. Executive branch agencies continue to conduct predictive data mining without congressional oversight.
The Savannah River Ecology Lab was established in 1951 to study effects on the environment from the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility, but did other internationally renowned environmental research. The lab was part of the University of Georgia, but the funding was federal. Past research showed that some shortcuts in cleanups were harmless to the environment and saved billions. In 2007, the Department of Energy abruptly eliminated the lab's funding. The lab had recently released research that toxins in coal-fired power plant emissions contaminated soil and surface water hundreds of miles away. The rumor was that Vice President Cheney ordered the lab's funding pulled as a favor to the coal industry.
Nick Lampson, chairman of the Science Committee's Energy and Environment Subcommittee, and I requested that DOE produce documents regarding why they'd pulled the lab's funding. There were no such documents, DOE responded. There were no emails, no memoranda, no notes from meetings, nothing. They talked among themselves about the funding for the lab, decided to save the money, and moved on to whatever was next. We held a hearing and DOE witnesses testified implausibly that they’d killed the lab’s funding to save money without any bureaucratic analysis of the lab’s work.
DOE's claim that there were no documents about the decision was as false as anything Rita Lavelle or the Iran-Contra defendants told Congress, but no whistleblower leaked documents that revealed the truth. We were stymied.
HOUSE DEMOCRATS DID TAKE one oversight dispute with the Bush administration to court and won, after a fashion. In 2006, DOJ forced nine U.S. attorneys to resign. The circumstances strongly suggested that the administration fired the U.S. attorneys for bringing prosecutions that hurt Republicans politically and for failing to bring prosecutions that might hurt Democrats, such as for bogus voter fraud charges. It was fairly clear that the decision was made at the White House. The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the president’s chief of staff, Josh Bolten, and the White House counsel, Harriet Miers.
The Bush administration refused to provide subpoenaed documents or to allow Bolten or Miers to testify. The administration argued that the House had no legitimate “legislative purpose” for the investigation, and no authority, because the power to remove executive branch officials was the president's alone. The administration added that Bolten and Miers were “absolutely immune” from congressional subpoena.
The House filed a civil lawsuit to ask the court to decide whether the House was entitled to the subpoenaed information, and if so, to order the administration to obey the congressional subpoenas. The trial judge ruled that the forced resignations were within Congress's authority to investigate. The House investigation was “a broader inquiry into whether improper partisan considerations have influenced prosecutorial discretion … It defies both reason and precedent to say that the Committee, which is charged with oversight of DOJ generally, cannot permissibly employ its investigative resources on this subject.”
The trial judge was even less impressed by the argument that Bolten and Miers had absolute immunity from congressional subpoena. “The Executive cannot identify a single judicial opinion that recognizes absolute immunity for senior presidential advisors in this or any other context,” wrote the trial judge. The only authority the Bush administration could provide for absolute immunity was OLC opinions, a “because I said so” argument. The court said that OLC opinions are “entitled to only as much weight as the force of their reasoning will support,” which was not much at all. One OLC opinion was three pages, had no citation of legal authority, and was “hastily issued on the same day that the President instructed” a senior White House official not to testify. The administration sought to be “judge of its own privilege through the assertion of absolute immunity,” the trial judge said, an argument that “rests upon a discredited notion of executive power and privilege.”
The case languished on appeal for months, however. The public's attention turned elsewhere, and when the new Obama administration provided subpoenaed information about the forced resignations, abuses of power by the last administration were old news.
BARR WAS OUT OF GOVERNMENT through the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama presidencies, but remained a constant presence in rightist legal circles. On June 8, 2018, Barr sent an unsolicited memo to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general to whom Robert Mueller then reported, and to Steve Engel, who headed the OLC, entitled “Re: Mueller’s ‘Obstruction’ Theory.” Trump’s firing of Jim Comey as director of the FBI could not be obstruction of justice regardless of Trump’s motives, Barr argued, because the president’s power to remove executive branch officials is “illimitable.”
Trump's effort to persuade Comey to “let go” of the investigation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was “plainly within his plenary discretion over the prosecutorial function. The Constitution vests all Federal law enforcement power, and hence prosecutorial discretion, in the President” (emphasis in original). The president’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion was “absolute” and “non-reviewable,” even for investigations into the president’s own conduct. “The illimitable nature of the President’s law enforcement discretion stems not just from the Constitution’s plenary grant of those powers to the President, but also from the ‘unitary’ character of the Executive branch itself,” Barr wrote.
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ALEX BRANDON/AP PHOTO
2019: As Trump’s attorney general, William Barr stonewalls congressional subpoenas with no legal authority other than the flimsy opinions of his own Office of Legal Counsel. The real strategy is to delay any disclosures until after the 2020 election.
Trump liked the sound of “illimitable” power and “plenary discretion.” Or at least, he got the message that Barr would help him do whatever he wanted. Trump appointed Barr to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general.
Barr turned to OLC for legal authority in the fight against congressional subpoenas. OLC advised that Don McGahn, the former White House counsel, was not subject to Congress's subpoena power. According to OLC, senior White House officials have “absolute immunity from congressional compulsion to testify about matters that occur during the course of discharging their official duties.” It was the same meager analysis from a decade earlier, still with no legal authority except OLC opinions.
OLC advised that the Treasury Department should not provide the House Ways and Means Committee with Trump's tax returns, despite a statute that requires Treasury to do so. “The Committee's authority under [the statute] … may not exceed the constitutional limitations on congressional power, which require that any committee investigation must serve a legitimate legislative purpose … [T]he separation of powers dictates that a congressional request cannot require the agency to close its eyes to overwhelming evidence that a congressional committee's stated purpose is a pretext for an illegitimate one.” The OLC opinion quoted from one of Barr's OLC opinions that Congress must “articulate its need for particular materials” before the executive branch will consider what information, if any, to provide Congress.
There is no remotely credible legal authority for OLC's argument that the executive should decide whether Congress has sufficient legislative purpose for an investigation, and whether Congress's stated purpose is sincere. And for good reason: Congress cannot function as an independent, co-equal branch of government with information rationed by the executive branch. The Trump administration's real strategy is to delay any disclosures to Congress until after the 2020 election, just as the George W. Bush administration ran out the clock on the U.S. attorney scandal investigation.
OLC argues that Congress's investigative authority is “merely the power of the Congress to inform itself of the facts needed to carry out legislative affairs,” not to inform the American people, despite many court decisions that quote Wilson on the “informing function” of Congress. The Trump administration argues that the president should decide what Americans need to know. Do House Democrats need consultants to tell them that they have the better of that political argument?
BARR AND OTHERS ON THE RIGHT have sought relentlessly for four decades to concentrate power in the president and strip power from Congress. Barr’s legal arguments sound haughty and scary to all but the most ardent Trump supporters. But Barr is committed to presidential power with or without legal authority and with or without public support. And he will advance presidential power by any means necessary, which includes frivolous legal arguments and dilatory tactics forbidden by court rules and canons of legal ethics, and false testimony forbidden by criminal law.
House Democrats have brought or intervened in lawsuits against Trump or the Trump administration over Trump's tax returns, his accountant's records, his bank loans, the refusal of subpoenaed witnesses to testify before Congress, Trump's diversion of appropriated funds for a border wall, and more. Still, House Democrats' enthusiasm for the fight does not match Barr's. House Democrats worry that confrontations with the Trump administration will appear unduly partisan. Elected leaders in a democracy should consider the opinions of their constituents, but the premise of the separation of powers in our Constitution is that members of each branch act vigorously to protect against the concentration of power in the other branches. House Democrats have not acted with the necessary vigor.
Progressives are right to call for the next president to implement progressive policies without new legislation to the extent possible, given the dysfunction of Congress. But it is not that “both sides” favor strong presidential power when their party controls the presidency, and oppose strong presidential power when their party does not, although there is some of that. Progressives want to act openly under the authority of statutes duly passed by Congress. Barr's view is that the Constitution gives the power to a unitary executive to act with or without Congress's approval, and to keep secret the executive's actions.
“The Framers' idea was that, by placing all discretionary law enforcement authority in the hands of a single ‘Chief Magistrate' elected by all the People, and by making him politically accountable for all exercises of discretion by himself or his agents, they were providing the best way of ensuring the ‘faithful exercise' of these powers,” Barr wrote in his memo to Rosenstein and Engel. “Every four years the people as a whole make a solemn national decision as to the person whom they trust to make these prudential decisions.”
That was not the framers' idea at all, of course. The framers feared, as Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, that the “accumulation of powers … in the same hands … whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elected, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” The distance is short from an executive with “illimitable” discretionary power, even if “elected by all the People,” and strongman rule. The survival of democracy requires diffusion of power, and Congress is also elected, as I vividly recall.
The special-counsel law in effect in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations expired in 1999, and now DOJ claims the power to decide whether to prosecute contempt of Congress, perjury or false statements to Congress, or obstruction of congressional investigations. Trump administration officials subpoenaed by Congress show little fear of criminal prosecution for contempt. Barr taunted Nancy Pelosi at a public event by asking if she had brought handcuffs.
But House Democrats should aggressively pursue every means available to hold the Trump administration to account. The Supreme Court recognizes an inherent judicial power to appoint special counsel if DOJ fails to prosecute contempt of court. “If the Judiciary were completely dependent on the Executive Branch to redress direct affronts to its authority,” the Supreme Court said in a 1987 opinion, “it would be powerless to protect itself if that Branch declined prosecution.” The same is true of contempt of Congress. House Democrats should demand that the courts empower a special counsel to prosecute Trump administration officials who defy subpoenas, a special counsel appointed not by DOJ, but by Congress.
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