William Pelham Barr is an American attorney who served as the 77th and 85th United States Attorney General. He is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. Barr was born in New York City in 1950 and grew up on the Upper West Side.
About William Barr in brief
William Pelham Barr is an American attorney who served as the 77th and 85th United States Attorney General. He worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during his schooling years. Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. He has received criticism from some for his handling of several challenges, including his mischaracterized summary and selective redaction of the Mueller report. Barr was born in New York City in 1950 and grew up on the Upper West Side. 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. His mother, Mary Margaret, also taught at Columbia. Barr’s father was Jewish and raised in Judaism but later converted to Christianity and joined the Catholic Church. He is the second of four sons, and his younger brother Stephen is a professor of physics at the University of Delaware. Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner from 2009 to 2018, and was a multimillionaire from 1994 to 2008, when he left the firm to become attorney general for the second time. He is a married father-of-four who lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and three children. He currently lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and has a daughter and son-in-law who live in New Jersey and California. He also has a son who works for the law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, which he joined in the 1980s.
Barr served as Deputy Attorney General in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump. In 1989, Barr, as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, justified the invasion of Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega. As deputy attorney general, Barr authorized an FBI operation in 1991 which freed hostages at the Talladega federal prison. In 1992, Barr authored the report The Case for More Incarceration, where he argued for an increase in the United States incarceration rate. Under Barr’s advice, President Bush in 1992 pardoned six officials involved in the Iran–Contra affair. In 1994, Barr did corporate legal work for GTE and its successor company Verizon Communications. After graduating from law school in 1977, Barr spent one year as a law clerk to Judge Malcolm Wilkey of the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals. He then joined the firm Shaw,. Pittman,. Potts, & T Rowbridge. He was known as a strong defender of presidential power. He wrote an advisory opinion justifying the U S. invasion of Afghanistan in September 1982. He served as Assistant Director for Legal Policy on the White House staff at the Reagan administration from May 1982 to September 1983. In 2009, Barr was appointed as U. S. Assistant Attorney General for the Department of Justice. He became attorney general in 1991 and served as Attorney General from 1991 to 1994.
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This page is based on the article William Barr published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
