by Craig Unger
Where his father had served in the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) during World War II, after studying at George Washington University Law School, Bill Barr joined the CIA’s Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC). At the time, congressional committees led by Representative Otis Pike (D-NY) and Senator Frank Church (D-ID) had been formed to investigate the CIA, FBI, and NSA for decades of abuses in Vietnam, Chile, Iran, and elsewhere.3
In the wake of Vietnam, many people were concerned about the so-called imperial presidency and thought the office had become too powerful. Barr thought just the opposite and did everything he could to fight those who were trying to limit the CIA and rein in the executive powers of the presidency.4 He soon joined forces with a group of ambitious, like-minded people who thought the pendulum had swung too far. In 1976, while working for then CIA director George H. W. Bush, Barr helped write the talking points that Bush used to fend off those congressional investigators who were reining in the intelligence agencies.5
Thanks in part to his relationship with the ever-genteel Bush, Barr was often underestimated in terms of his ruthlessness and unrelenting partisanship. Bush was courtly, wrote elaborate thank-you notes, and was so agreeable that he risked being seen as “a wimp,” as Newsweek famously suggested. Thanks to this genial exterior, he seemed guileless, more concerned with politeness, civility, and accommodation than substantive issues and confrontation.
But beneath that facade, as head of the CIA, George H. W. Bush had mastered the arts of compartmentalization and secrecy. Later, as vice president, under the guise of embarking on a “peace mission” to the Middle East in 1986, Bush secretly undertook an extraordinarily Machiavellian covert operation—which Murray Waas and I wrote about in the New Yorker—in which he actually went operational and provided military intelligence to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein as a means of facilitating an illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran.6 That duality—polished credentials paired with unyielding partisanship, the iron fist in the velvet glove—was a highly prized prerequisite among Bush’s younger acolytes, among them C. Boyden Gray.
A tall, slender figure with notably bushy eyebrows, Gray was the son of Eisenhower’s national security advisor and an heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, who had schooled at St. Mark’s, Harvard, and the University of North Carolina Law School. He clerked for Earl Warren, then chief justice of the US Supreme Court, and won a partnership at the white-shoe Washington firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.
Then he became counsel to Vice President Bush during the Reagan presidency. Nearly a generation younger than his mentor, Gray was clubbable but more of a shambling, rumpled six-foot, six-inch Ichabod Crane–like figure whose burnished credentials masked a merciless partisanship. In the end, Bush treated Gray like a son.
As for William Barr, he had worked for the CIA between 1971 and 1977 while attending grad school and law school, first as an intelligence analyst and later in the CIA’s Office of Legislative Counsel. After Reagan came to power in 1981, Barr became friendly with Gray, who was then counsel to Vice President Bush. The two men worked together on regulatory issues and became close friends.7
When Vice President Bush ran for president in 1988, Barr joined his campaign, worked briefly on the transition team after Bush won, and was installed in the Department of Justice as head of the Office of Legal Counsel even before Bush took office as president. As Barr describes it in an interview for an oral history project at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, he got the job “because Boyden Gray thought that that was a very important job and was intent on getting someone in that position who believed in executive authority.”
Which Barr did. Later, under Bill Clinton, the OLC became relatively unimportant, with just eight or nine lawyers.8 But in the George H. W. Bush administration, Barr had no fewer than twenty-six lawyers working full-time to further empower the president.
Gray and Barr got along well. Barr, then in his late thirties, was smart and adroit when it came to navigating complex bureaucracies. He and Gray shared the theory that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president complete authority over the executive branch, with a wide berth to make war and interpret laws,9 and that meant Barr finally had a position with which to implement his ideas about the unitary executive. When he took over the OLC, he wrote a formal and oft-cited memo titled “Common Legislative Encroachments on Executive Branch Authority,” whose soporific title belied the extraordinary influence it had in delineating “common provisions of legislation that are offensive to principles of separation of powers, and to executive power in particular, from the standpoint of policy or constitutional law.”10
The memo went on to list ten ways in which he thought Congress had been violating Article 2, arguing, “Only by consistently and forcefully resisting such congressional incursions can executive branch prerogatives be preserved.”
He and Gray worked to do precisely that. Asserting that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the president far-reaching powers, Barr lashed out at one “encroachment” on executive power after another by Congress and argued for the broad assertion of executive privilege. Such views, of course, made him particularly hostile to congressional oversight, watchdog positions such as inspectors general, and, of course, independent counsels—or indeed any force that might restrict the president. If fully implemented, the unitary executive theory would allow presidents to take almost any actions they wanted at home or abroad without congressional authorization and would allow them to resist any attempts by Congress to implement oversight or constraints.
“I probably spoke every day to Boyden or someone in his office,” Barr said in the University of Virginia’s Miller Center interview. “We set up some things because of Boyden’s and my own interest in the powers of the Presidency and President Bush’s, too, because I think Bush felt that the powers of the Presidency had been severely eroded since Watergate and the tactics of the Hill Democrats over an extended period of time when they were in power. So we set up a group of general counsels under my chairmanship, and we’d bring in all the general counsels of all the executive agencies. I chaired the group. Boyden would come over, and we basically set uniform standards on how you handle document requests, how you serve executive privilege, what Congress can get, what they can’t get. We tried to impose a certain uniformity.”
Even though what was taking place belied the ostensibly moderate Bush presidency, Barr was among the first to put this all together as coherent ideology and to implement it. In 1990, after Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, Barr, who had been promoted to deputy attorney general, was called to a White House meeting by Bush, who asked if he needed congressional approval to send US troops into the region.11 Barr insisted that the inherent authority of the president gave him the power to start a war whenever he chose to do so. But, on political grounds, he also advised Bush to get authority from Congress.
And so the theory of the unitary executive giving the White House virtually unlimited power—at least when Republicans occupied the White House—became an elemental part of GOP gospel. At the same time, Boyden Gray, who also happened to be a member of the Federalist Society, kept a close watch on judicial appointments and made sure all the judges fell clearly within Federalist Society guidelines, including Clarence Thomas in his contentious 1992 appointment to the Supreme Court. This new right-wing assault on the judiciary began stealthily, and at the time few people were even aware of who the players were, much less the forces they represented and the ties that were being forged.
After the Gulf War was successfully concluded in 1991, Bush appointed Barr as attorney general. Even at this relatively early stage of his career, this was a man who saw no limits to executive power. He gave voice to the imperial elements of Bush senior’s presidency—and amplified them. As the Village Voice noted in a 1992 piece by Frank Snepp, Barr was the man who came up with the legal foundation behind the 1991 Gulf War, the invasi
on of Panama, and the officially sanctioned kidnapping of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.12
Barr was also eager to put his views into action, and once he became attorney general in late 1991, he earned the sobriquet “Coverup-General,” as conservative columnist William Safire put it in the New York Times.13 To Barr, the tenets of the unitary executive meant shielding the executive branch from congressional oversight in a way that basically allowed them to get away with murder. That included the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Bush administration defied Congress by illegally selling weapons to Iran and then diverting the funds to support the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. It included the Iraqgate scandal in which the United States guaranteed grain loans that were used to finance Saddam Hussein’s war machine in Iraq. And it included the so-called Inslaw scandal involving a Washington, DC–based tech company named Inslaw that accused the Department of Justice of conspiring to steal its software for use in covert intelligence operations against foreign governments.
And when Bush needed someone to quell the flames from Iran-Contra and Iraqgate that threatened his presidency, time and again, Barr was Mr. Whitewash, the cleanup man, the guy who kept the secrets and put out the fires. In August 1992, when the FBI uncovered Iraqgate, the House Judiciary Committee called for a special prosecutor who was not beholden to the Bush administration. In response, Attorney General Barr stonewalled the House Banking Committee, asserting that “public disclosure of classified information harms the national security.”
As Safire noted in a subsequent column, Barr had personally taken charge of the cover-up. “Despite demands from both Judiciary committees . . . Barr broke precedent and refused to seek independent counsel in the Iraqgate scandal,” Safire wrote. “Instead, he hand-picked a whitewasher who dutifully filibustered past the election, ultimately condemning Congress for the arms buildup of Saddam Hussein.”14
“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation?” Safire wrote earlier. “Because he knows where it may lead: to [former attorney general] Dick Thornburgh, [then secretary of state] James Baker, [former secretary of agriculture] Clayton Yeutter, [National Security Advisor] Brent Scowcroft and himself. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”
Safire further asserted that Barr and Robert Mueller, who was then chief of Barr’s Criminal Division, could face prosecution “if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”15
Similarly, to the extent the Barr Justice Department investigated the Inslaw affair—in effect, investigating itself, since it was the Justice Department that allegedly stole the software—the relevant grand jury testimony was heavily redacted.16 And when twenty-one Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote Barr to ask him to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the Inslaw affair, he declined to follow through.
Finally, that same year, Barr was called upon to advise Bush 41 on whether to recommend presidential pardons for high-level government officials who were actors in the Iran-Contra scandal. So when it came to doling out “punishment” to the principals behind Iran-Contra, Bill Barr stealthily worked his magic behind the scenes.17 For Barr, the decision was a no-brainer. As the Nixon presidency had been on the line with Watergate, so the Reagan-Bush legacy was on the line with Iran-Contra.
Barr managed to neutralize the attacks when he urged President George H. W. Bush to grant pardons to six men, including former national security advisor Robert McFarlane, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams.
When that happened, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh was incensed. “The Iran-Contra cover-up has now been completed,” he said.18
* * *
—
At the same time Attorney General Barr launched his crusade to expand the powers of the presidency, the intelligence community was still on the hunt for moles who had been wreaking havoc in American intelligence. The FBI was painfully aware that there had been too many losses, but it didn’t know who the culprits were.
Temporarily at least, Hanssen was on hiatus from spying. In the wake of the failed August 1991 coup that attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union was in chaos. Its subsequent downfall meant that Hanssen had nowhere to go until the newly formed Russian Federation and successor agencies to the KGB rose again.
Meanwhile, he was still ready, willing, and able to spy again. And because he was in the FBI, he was ultimately responsible to the Department of Justice and William Barr, and happened to be far, far closer to Barr than anyone seemed to know.
That’s because in late 1991, a year after Bonnie discovered the cash in Hanssen’s dresser and word got out that he might be a Soviet spy, Hanssen’s brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general Barr. At the time, Wauck, as he wrote in a series of emails to me, was merely a “27-year-old novice speechwriter [who was] unaware of any speculation about Hanssen being a spy until the day he was arrested.”
Older brother Mark, the FBI agent in Chicago, did of course know about Hanssen’s cash—and had dutifully informed his superiors about his suspicions. But he didn’t tell his younger brother, even when John began working for Barr. “I guess you could say that back then I was rather naive. I didn’t assume that the attorney general would be involved in this kind of stuff,” Mark Wauck told me. “I think my attitude probably would’ve been that the attorney general wouldn’t have a need to know. Knowing what I know now, I suppose that any kind of investigation of that sort would’ve been brought to Barr’s attention.”
As for brother John, he says he didn’t have a clue. “For me, as for most people who knew him, his arrest [in 2001] came as a bolt from the blue,” Father John wrote. “It never occurred to me that Hanssen might commit treason. Based on what I could see, nothing would have seemed less likely.”
And there was William Barr, one of the youngest attorney generals in American history, overseeing the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speechwriter’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei.
Barr’s activities with regard to Opus Dei and the judiciary are both murky and intriguing, and when it comes to ducking questions about the subject, Father John doesn’t miss a beat. “The very possibility that my name might figure in a book about William Barr seems slightly preposterous to me, and I feel totally out of place in any narrative involving the hypothetical influence of Opus Dei on the US judiciary,” he emailed me. “Whether there might be individual members of Opus Dei or people who could be considered connected to Opus Dei who might have an impact on judicial affairs is a question about which I am utterly ignorant.”
More specifically, he says that when he started work at the Justice Department in 1991, he had no communication with Barr with regard to Opus Dei. “I was young, new on the job, and on unfamiliar turf,” he wrote. And besides, he added, he was not confident that ties to Opus Dei would have left him in good favor. “In 1991, the founder of Opus Dei had not yet been beatified, much less canonized. I don’t think I would have taken it for granted that Bill Barr held a high opinion of Opus Dei.”
As a matter of principle, Opus Dei said it had no role in matters that might have involved the Justice Department. But also as a matter of principle, Opus Dei also said that its members were free to express and act out their own political views and free to conceal their ties to Opus Dei. And if it just so happened that a number of highly placed people tied to Opus Dei played extraordinarily powerful roles in moving the entire judiciary to the right, well, perhaps Opus Dei really had nothing to do with it.
“My impression from afar is that there are a lot of Catholic lawyers in DC (heck, there are a lot of Catholics on the Supreme Court itself),
and it would be natural/inevitable for their Catholicism to have an impact in multiple ways (DC is a pretty small town),” Father John wrote. “But it would be inappropriate and, as I say, probably misleading for me . . . to offer uninformed conjectures about whether and how members of Opus Dei might fit into that story.”
As befits a secret society, Opus Dei made it increasingly difficult to decipher just who is and who is not a member. Take two-time attorney general William Barr, a devout Catholic who served as chairman of the board of the Catholic Information Center in 2014, and, according to the Senate questionnaire for his confirmation, remained on the board to 2017. But Opus Dei says that did not necessarily mean he was a member of the prelature, even though the CIC was largely staffed by Opus Dei priests and it was the center of the prelature’s operations.
But was he anyway—as reported by the Huffington Post?19 When I asked Brian Finnerty, the US communications director for Opus Dei, he suggested that I talk to Barr about it, and repeated his mantra that “Opus Dei as a matter of policy respects the privacy of its members.”20
But then in December 2019, Finnerty emailed me with a new response, which contained a link to a new posting on the subject that appeared on Opus Dei’s website:
“Our normal policy is not to identify members (or non-members) of the Prelature, but rather to leave it to each individual to make known this information. Nevertheless, because there have been recent news accounts referring to the US Attorney General, William Barr, as a member of Opus Dei, we would like to clarify that Mr. Barr is not a member of Opus Dei nor has he ever been one.”21
However, given Opus Dei’s penchant for secrecy, I pressed further. After all, there were different kinds of members—in fact, at least six categories. According to NBC News, of those categories, the biggest, supernumeraries, accounts for about 70 percent of Opus Dei’s membership.22 That designation that includes married men and women who lead traditional family lives and have careers in the secular world while participating in regular meetings, retreats, and fundraising. The next, containing about 20 percent of Opus Dei’s membership, are numeraries, a grouping of celibate members who make themselves fully available to serve the prelature. The other four categories are numerary assistants, associates, priests, and cooperators.