40 newyork| december9–22, 2019
whoworkedunderBarrintheOLC.Biden
invitedtheBarrfamilyuptovisithishome
inDelaware.
MuchofBarr’s tenure coincidedwiththe
1992 electioncampaign.Like everyattorney
general,hefaceddecisionswithpolitical
implications,and hewasunapologetic
aboutlookingoutforBush’s interests.When
a coupinHaiticausedthrongsof refugeesto
fleeinboats,Barrset a policy of intercepting
thematseaanddetainingthemat Guantá-
namoBay, outsidethepurviewof U.S.
immigrationlaws.Thepolicy causeda clash
withmilitaryleaders,includingDefense
Secretary Dick Cheney. In the oral-history
interview, Barr said his attitude was: “You
want 80,000 Haitians to descend on Florida
several months before the election? Come
on, give me a break.”
Bill Clinton ran on an economic message,
but Bush would blame his defeat on a politi-
cal investigation. On the Friday before the
election, Lawrence Walsh, the independent
counsel probing the Iran-Contra scandal,
issued an indictment that included new
details about Bush’s role. The news domi-
nated the last days of the race.“Walsh
abused his power!” Bush complained to
Barr the day after the election, according to
Bob Woodward’s book Shadow. On his way
out of office, Bush wanted to put an end to
the long-running investigation. Under the
independent-counsel statute, Walsh could
be fired for misconduct, a move Barr consid-
ered. But he and Bush settled onanother
solution. Bush simply pardoned all the Iran-
Contra defendants.
In the final stage of the campaign, Barr
was presented with an opportunityto exer-
cise the kind of political supervision he
believed prosecutors required. On aflight to
a ceremony with other administration offi-
cials, a White House aide informed him,
cryptically, of a rumor about a casedown in
Arkansas involving a savings-and-loan and
Bill Clinton. Barr did some diggingand dis-
covered that the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock
was sitting on a criminal referral that men-
tioned Clinton and a failed real-estate ven-
ture called the Whitewater Development
Corporation. The prosecutor, a Republican,foundthecaseflimsy, andthereferral
describedBillandHillary Clintonaswit-
nesses,notsuspects.ButBarrhadbeentold
thattheprosecutor’sconclusionwas“cut-
tingthema lotofslack,”helatertestifiedin
a deposition,andhedecidedto“get thecase
ontherighttrack”byescalatingit toWash-
ington.Muellerhelda meetingwithFBI
officialsandtoldthemtoinvestigateaggres-
sively,just asinany otherbank-fraudcase.
TheArkansasprosecutorfiredoff anangry
letter,sayingthe“insistenceforurgency”
suggestedan“attempttointerveneintothe
politicalprocessoftheupcomingpresiden-
tial election.”
Barr dictated that the investigation would
proceed, but in secret, so as not to interfere
with the election. “Later, a number of
Republicans said, ‘Well, hell, why didn’t
you? You would’ve saved the country,’ ” Barr
told me. He laughed, since we both knew
how the story ended for Clinton. With the
complaint revived, the FBI continued to
investigate the Whitewater case after Barr
was gone. Political investigations burn on a
long fuse. An independent counsel, Kenneth
Starr, took over the inquiry, and itwent in
unanticipated directions.J
ust one year ago, Barr was
semi- retired and semi-obscure,
practicing law in Washington and
living in McLean, Virginia, the
deep state’s suburban home. After
his relatively brief stint as attorneygeneral
ended with Bush’s defeat, he leftgovern-
ment at an age young enough to embark on
a whole second career. He becamegeneral
counsel at a small telephone company, GTE,
which he helped to guide through aseries of
mergers and acquisitions as it morphed into
Verizon. He gained deep knowledge of regu-
lation and antitrust law and made a consid-
erable fortune. (Forbes has estimated his net
worth at $40 million.) In 2008, Barr took an
early retirement from Verizon andwent on
to a comfortable position at a prominent
Washington law firm.
All three of his daughters, who attended
his first Senate-confirmation hearing in
their Sunday best, grew up to begovern-the long run the freest government.” For all
his conciliatory intellectual rhetoric, though,
Barr had been given a confrontational mis-
sion to expand presidential authority. “All of
us, coming out of Watergate, felt that Con-
gress had taken more than its proper share
of power back,” says C. Boyden Gray, the
White House counsel at the time. He says he
recommended Barr because he wanted an
ally at the OLC who believed in the theory of
the unitary executive.
Soon after Barr was confirmed, he issued
a memorandumtargetinga list of “encroach-
ments”onex ecutiveauthority, includingthe
independent-counsel law, a post-Watergate
reform that protected political investiga-
tions from interference. Barr disliked the
law because he thought an independent
prosecutor, with a single focus, could easily
run rampant, pursuing phantom crimes.
Even among Republicans who believed in a
strong president, some of Barr’s positions
were extreme. “Bill’s answer was uniformly
that the president gets what he wants,” says
Douglas Kmiec, Barr’s immediate OLC pre-
decessor, now teaching constitutional law at
Pepperdine University. “I think a good num-
ber of us from OLC said, ‘Wait a minute.’”
Barr turned his small office into an ideo-
logical engine room staffed by like-minded
young conservatives and fought internal
battles with the more-moderate factions of
the Bush administration. Some senior offi-
cials referred to Barr and his deputy as “the
bulldogs.” Barr was known for his infinite
confidence, but he occasionally outsmarted
himself. Journalist Jan Crawford, in her
book Supreme Conflict, writes that when a
seat opened on the Supreme Court in 1990,
OLC attorneys worked all night to prepare a
memo that would sink the leading candi-
date, Kenneth Starr, a colleague Barr con-
sidered “maddeningly squishy.” The seat
instead went to David Souter, the favorite of
Bush’s chief of staff, who turned out to be a
reliable liberal vote.
Barr impressed Bush, though, and after
an unusually quick scramble up the rungs of
the department, he was named attorney
general in 1991 at the age of 41. His primary
preoccupation was violent crime, which was
then seen as an epidemic. Unlike many who
come into the position, Barr had little previ-
ous experience with law enforcement, so he
assembled a leadership team of seasoned
prosecutors. The head of his criminal divi-
sion was a square-jawed ex-Marine, Robert
Mueller. Barr advocated punitive measures
to fight gangs and gun offenses, and the
department produced a report with the
now-infamous title “The Case for More
Incarceration.” His crime crackdown had
bipartisan support. Barr and Biden cooper-
ated. “I think it’s pretty fair to say that Bill
charmed Joe Biden,” says Timothy Flanigan,
“Mueller would saythings that were kind ofstupid at times, andBill would just mercilesslymake fun of him.”