William Barr

Biography

William Barr was born in New York City in 1950. He studied government and Chinese studies at Columbia University and worked for the CIA from 1971 to 1977 while earning a law degree at night at George Washington University. After a clerkship on the D.C. Circuit he practised at the firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, with a spell on the Reagan White House domestic policy staff.

Under President George H. W. Bush he headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 1989, became deputy attorney general in 1990 and attorney general in 1991, serving until 1993. A strong advocate of presidential power and tougher sentencing, he ordered the FBI operation that freed hostages at the Talladega federal prison in 1991 and wrote the 1992 report The Case for More Incarceration.

He then spent fourteen years as general counsel of GTE and later Verizon. Returning as attorney general under Donald Trump in 2019, he was criticised for his summary of the Mueller report, his intervention in the cases of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, the resumption of federal executions and the removal of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. He left office in December 2020.