William Pelham Barr was born May 23, 1950, to a Manhattan family that prized scholarship, Catholicism and Republican conservatism. His father was a World War II intelligence officer who became an assistant dean at Columbia University, then headed the elite, private Dalton School before resigning in a dispute with trustees.
A Republican Party district leader in an overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood, Mr. Barr’s father criticized his liberal colleagues as sloppy thinkers with “messianic” complexes, earning occasional headlines calling him a maverick.
Young Bill Barr was also a defender of Republican causes at Horace Mann, the private school he attended in the Bronx. “He was conservative in attitude, demeanor and politics in a way that was distinctive,” said Doug Schoen, a Democratic pollster and former fellow student.
But he came across as thoughtful, not ideologically rigid, Mr. Schoen said. He also had a disarming wit and warm demeanor, qualities that later in life attracted a broad circle of friends, including some Democratic lawyers who heartily disagreed with his politics and legal philosophy. “It’s hard not to like him,” said Mr. Cooper, the former senior Justice Department official.
He studied at Columbia University, eventually obtaining a master’s degree in government and Chinese studies. At a fraternity party he hosted, he met his wife, Christine, a student at the College of Mount Saint Vincent. By age 23, he was married.
Mr. Barr, who once told a high school counselor he wanted to lead the C.I.A., began as an intern there. He took night classes at George Washington University Law School, figuring he could fall back on law if he got “boxed in counting rivets on Chinese tanks” as an intelligence analyst, he later said. It quickly became his passion.
He clerked for Malcolm R. Wilkey, a noted conservative judge on the federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Five years earlier, Judge Wilkey had dissented from the court’s historic opinion ordering President Richard M. Nixon to turn over his secret Watergate tape recordings, arguing that discussions between a president and his advisers are protected by “absolute privilege.”
Like the judge, Mr. Barr came to embrace an aggressive view of presidential powers outlined in Article II of the Constitution.
“Bill’s natural default is Article II,” said Mr. Turley, a defender of congressional powers defined in Article I. “He views a strong executive as more needed than ever to stabilize the country and the world at large.”
In between stints at a Washington law firm, Mr. Barr worked from 1982 to 1983 at the Reagan White House under C. Boyden Gray, then counsel to Vice President George Bush. Mr. Gray, who shared Mr. Barr’s belief that the post-Watergate reforms had unduly eroded the powers of the presidency, became his patron.
When Mr. Bush was elected president, Mr. Gray helped elevate Mr. Barr to head the Justice Department’s powerful Office of Legal Counsel, whose interpretations of the Constitution and law bind the executive branch unless overruled by the attorney general or president.
Over the next four years, as he rose to deputy attorney general, then attorney general, Mr. Barr put into practice his expansive view of the executive branch’s authority. He was deeply involved in the administration’s decision to invade Panama and arrest its strongman, Manuel Noriega, a move the United Nations condemned as a violation of international law.
He advised President Bush that he did not need lawmakers’ approval to unilaterally attack Iraq in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, although he recommended that Mr. Bush seek a resolution of congressional support anyway.
In that post-Watergate era, the White House was very deferential to the Justice Department, Mr. Barr said in a 2001 interview with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Once, when Mr. Bush asked if he could brief the National Security Council on a pending indictment of terrorists, Mr. Barr was flabbergasted, as he later recalled: “Would it be O.K.? Well, I work for you; you’re the top law enforcement officer. Of course it’s O.K.”
Mr. Barr’s forte was his administrative skills, said Nancy Baker, a scholar of attorneys general who interviewed him for the Miller Center. “He had a comfort level with the levers of power and how you get what you want” that extended to the Oval Office, she said.
When Attorney General Dick Thornburgh resigned in mid-1991 to run for the Senate and Mr. Bush picked Mr. Barr to replace him, the president notified Mr. Barr that the White House would choose a deputy with more political clout than he had. Mr. Barr replied: “The attorney general’s balls are in the deputy attorney general’s pocket, and I’m not putting my balls in anyone’s pocket I don’t know.”
He saw some matters through both a legal and political lens. Immigration law, he said, dictated that thousands of Haitians who had fled the island nation on rickety boats seeking asylum after a coup should not be allowed to enter the United States. But in discussions with other officials, he also pointed out the political damage if they reached American shores. “You want 80,000 Haitians to descend on Florida months before the election?” he said. “Gimme a break.”
While he crafted a broad policy agenda, a White House preoccupied with Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign mainly ignored it. Largely for that reason, Ms. Baker said, she graded his tenure, which lasted just 17 months, a B-minus.
His treatment of independent counsels, a post-Watergate reform, in some ways foreshadowed the division over his handling of the findings of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. He abhorred the now-defunct independent counsel statute, saying it created “headhunters” who answered to no one.
Nonetheless, just days before the act was to expire, he appointed one to look into charges that administration officials had tampered with passport records of Mr. Bush’s opponent in his bid for re-election, Bill Clinton. White House aides were furious, Mr. Barr later said, but “I had to do it.”
On the other hand, he strove to put an end to the inquiry of another independent counsel, whom he described as out of control.
Lawrence E. Walsh spent almost seven years investigating how the Reagan administration had secretly sold arms to Iran to win the release of American hostages, then used the profits to secretly arm anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua despite a law cutting off assistance to them. The obstruction of justice case he mounted against Caspar Weinberger, President Ronald Reagan’s defense secretary, threatened to reveal that Mr. Bush, as vice president, was more implicated in the arms shipments than he had claimed.
In his waning days in office, Mr. Bush resolved to pardon Mr. Weinberger. “I went over and told the president I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others,” Mr. Barr later said. Mr. Walsh called the pardons “the last card” in the cover-up.
Six years later, senior Clinton administration officials were equally critical of the independent counsel Ken Starr’s far-flung investigation of Mr. Clinton. But in that case, in a letter signed by three other former attorneys general, Mr. Barr assailed the officials, not the investigators.
The attacks on Mr. Starr “appear to have the improper purpose of influencing and impeding an ongoing criminal investigation and intimidating possible jurors, witnesses and even investigators,” the 1998 letter said. Twenty-one years later, those comments seem strikingly at odds with how Mr. Barr described Mr. Trump’s efforts to interfere with the Mueller inquiry.
While he periodically opined on other legal and political issues after President Bush’s defeat, Mr. Barr concentrated on the corporate work that made him a multimillionaire. Other lawyers described him as a formidable general counsel for GTE, the telecommunications giant that is now Verizon.
Mr. Barr provided the Justice Department with information to block mergers of competitors that might create unfair monopolies — and harm his company, said Mr. Jhaveri, a former antitrust lawyer with the Justice Department’s telecommunications task force. “With a lot of help from Barr,” he said, the department prevented a merger between WorldCom and Sprint. Mr. Barr knew “what to put into the subpoenas and what issues the companies would be vulnerable on,” he said.
A few years later, after GTE became Verizon, Mr. Barr worked quietly to vanquish the competition again. A former engineer from MCI called his office with a lead: MCI may have wrongfully routed phone traffic through Canada to avoid fees — a potential national security risk. Mr. Barr chased down information from other former MCI employees and rival telecom companies.
Then he took his case to federal regulators and to James B. Comey, then the United States attorney in Manhattan. He also lobbied against new federal contracts to MCI. The investigations exacerbated MCI’s many other woes, and in 2005, Verizon acquired it.
By 2012, Mr. Barr had been semiretired for three years, serving on corporate boards, traveling and playing the bagpipes. Then, the youngest of his three daughters, Meg McGaughey, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
She said in an interview that her father tackled her illness as if he were deconstructing a complex legal case. When standard treatments failed her and her odds of survival plummeted, he steeped himself in medical studies until a stem-cell transplant worked.
Always thick-skinned, she said, her father emerged from her lengthy ordeal even more unflappable. “If it’s not about my daughter’s being mortally ill,” he said this year in an interview with a Fox News contributor, “it’s nothing.”