BARR, WILLIAM PELHAM
William Pelham Barr served as attorney general
of the United States from 1991 to 1993 under
President GEORGE H.W. BUSH.
The son of Donald Barr and Mary Ahern
Barr, William Barr was born May 23, 1950, in
New York City, and was schooled there.He com-
pleted an undergraduate degree at New York’s
Columbia University in 1971 and began a two-
year master’s program in Chinese studies.
Armed with his graduate degree, he moved to
Washington, D.C., in 1973 and went to work as
a staff officer with the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
AGENCY (CIA).He was accompanied by his wife,
Christine Moynihan, to whom he was married
on June 23, 1973.
While working at the CIA, Barr enrolled in
the night program at George Washington Uni-
versity Law School. He earned his law degree in
1977, graduating second in his class. After law
school, he clerked for one year with the presid-
ing judge of the District of Columbia Circuit
Court. He was admitted to the Virginia bar in
1977 and to the District of Columbia bar in
1978. Also in 1978, Barr accepted an associate
position at the Washington, D.C., law firm of
Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge. There, he
concentrated on civil litigation and federal
administrative practice.
In 1982, Barr was named to President
Ronald Reagan’s Domestic Policy Council. Dur-
ing his two years of service, he became well
known and respected by the administration and
leaders in the REPUBLICAN PARTY.Barr returned
to Shaw, Pittman in 1984, to resume his legal
career. He was made a partner of the firm in
1985.
After several years in private practice, Barr
reentered public service in 1989, when he was
named assistant attorney general by the George
H.W. Bush administration.He took over the Jus-
tice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where
his role was to advise the White House and the
attorney general and other administration offi-
cials.Historically, the Office of Legal Counsel has
been called upon to reassure presidents that their
intended actions are within the law.
As assistant attorney general, Barr authored
two controversial ADVISORY OPINIONS that
allowed President Bush to expand his war on
drugs and to apprehend Panamanian drug lord
Manuel Noriega. One opinion (13 U.S. Op. Off.
Legal Counsel 387) held that U.S.military forces
could be assigned to law enforcement operations
abroad, and the other (13 U.S. Op. Off. Legal
Counsel 195) that the president had authority to
order the FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION
(FBI) to arrest fugitives overseas without con-
sent of the local government.
Barr was named deputy attorney general in
1990. He became acting attorney general in June
1991 when RICHARD THORNBURGH resigned to
enter the race for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsyl-
vania. Barr was nominated and confirmed as
attorney general in the fall of 1991, becoming, at
age forty-one, the youngest person to hold that
post since RAMSEY CLARK, who was appointed
in 1967.
After years of unpleasant and adversarial
relationships with Attorneys General EDWIN
MEESE III and Thornburgh, Congress welcomed
Barr’s appointment. Members of Congress
praised his candor and cooperation, and they
supported his decision to launch internal inves-
tigations into the Justice Department’s handling
of the Bank of Credit and Commerce Interna-
tional (BCCI) scandal and the Inslaw computer
scandal. BCCI was shut down by bank regulators
in 1991 for massive FRAUD, theft, MONEY LAUN-
DERING, and the financing of arms deals and
terrorist activities. Depositors lost billions when
the bank’s assets were seized. Inslaw, Inc.,
accused the JUSTICE DEPARTMENT of conspiring
to steal its proprietary software after the com-
pany’s government contract had been revoked.
The AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION was
encouraged by Barr’s willingness to reconsider a
Thornburgh decision that prevented local bar
associations from interviewing judicial nomi-
nees, and an editorial in the November 25, 1991,
issue of National Law Journal praised the
department planned by the new attorney gen-
eral as less political, more open, and more
“inclined toward integrity” than the depart-
ments run by his immediate predecessors in the
RONALD REAGAN and George H. W. Bush
administrations.
However, Barr’s honeymoon with the
Democratic Congress and the nation’s legal
press did not last. Barr was soon criticized for his
inability to obtain CIA cooperation in the BCCI
and Banca Nationale del Lavoro (BNL) investi-
gations and for delays in closing down the BCCI.
A CIA investigation revealed that an Atlanta, Georgia, branch of the BNL had provided fraudulent
loans to Iraq—loans that helped Saddam
Hussein to build his military strength. Barr’s
internal investigation of the theft of an Inslawdeveloped
computer program by government
officials was tagged a whitewash. He angered
Japanese officials when he announced a change
in antitrust policy that allowed the Justice
Department to bring cases against Japanese cartels
that restricted U.S. exports. Moreover, Barr
fought popular opinion and strong evidence of
improprieties by the Justice Department when
he continued to support the deportation of John
Demjanjuk—wrongly accused of being the infamous
Nazi death camp guard who was called
Ivan the Terrible.
Finally, Barr took the unprecedented step of
denying a congressional request for an independent
investigation into the events known as
Iraqgate. Barr said he and the Justice Department
would conduct their own investigation to
determine whether anyone in the Bush administration
had committed a crime by giving aid to
Saddam Hussein prior to the Iraqi invasion of
Kuwait and the resulting Persian Gulf War.
Ongoing questions about the administration’s
knowledge of, and involvement in, Iraqgate
contributed to Bush’s defeat in the
presidential election of 1992 and ended Barr’s
tenure as the nation’s attorney general.
In spite of his bright beginning, Barr was
unable to depart significantly from the agendas
and operational styles of his predecessors and
the presidents they served. According to the
December 7, 1992 issue of National Law Journal,
“Under Presidents Reagan and Bush and their
Attorneys General Ed Meese, Dick Thornburgh
and William P. Barr, the nation witnessed the
politicization of the [Justice D]epartment
beyond anything that has gone before”.
In 1993, Barr returned to Shaw, Pittman and
resumed the PRACTICE OF LAW. At the time, he
was a member of the American Bar Association,
the Virginia State Bar Association, and the District
of Columbia Bar Association.
Barr later joined Verizon Communications,
a provider of phone services as head of its legal
department. Under his leadership, the department
developed a high percentage of minority
and women attorneys and employees. The legal
department of New York-based Verizon Communications
was named the 2002 Northeast
Region Employer of Choice by the Minority
Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA).
In 2001 as the competition between local
phone companies and other digital subscriber
line (DSL) providers grew, Barr instituted a lawsuit
against DSL provider Covad Communications.
The suit, which claimed that Covad
employees had made false reports that Verizon
had obstructed Covad’s installation services, was
dismissed by a federal district court judge in
November 2002.
In addition to his work as general counsel
for Verizon, Barr has lectured to groups such as
the Federalist Society and has offered advice to
the administration of GEORGE W. BUSH concerning
legal measures that should be taken to fight
TERRORISM.
FURTHER READINGS
Baker, Nancy V. 1992. Conflicting Loyalties: Law and Politics
in the Attorney General’s Office, 1789-1990. Lawrence:
Univ. Press of Kansas.
Department of Justice. 1991. 200th Anniversary of the Office
of the Attorney General, 1789-1989. Washington, D.C.:
Department of Justice, Office of Attorney General and
Justice Management Division.
Fletcher, Martin. 2001. “Terror Leaders Could Die By Firing
Squad.” London Times. (November 16).
“Legal Job No. 1.” 1992. National Law Journal 15 (December
7).
Minority Corporate Counsel Association (MCCA).Available
online at (accessed May 31, 2003).
