William Barr
77th & 85th United States Attorney General (born 1950)
William Pelham Barr (born May 23, 1950) is an American attorney who served as United States Attorney General in the administration of President George H. W. Bush from 1991 to 1993 and again in the first administration of President Donald Trump from 2019 to 2020.
Born and raised in New York City, Barr was educated at the Horace Mann School, Columbia University, and George Washington University Law School. From 1971 to 1977, Barr was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. He then served as a law clerk to judge Malcolm Richard Wilkey of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In the 1980s, Barr worked for the law firm Shaw, Pittman, Potts & Trowbridge, with one year's work in the White House of the Ronald Reagan administration dealing with legal policies. Before becoming attorney general in 1991, Barr held numerous other posts within the Department of Justice, including leading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and serving as deputy attorney general. From 1994 to 2008, Barr did corporate legal work for GTE and its successor company Verizon Communications. From 2009 to 2018, Barr served on the board of directors for Time Warner.
Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. In 1989, Barr, as the head of the OLC, justified the U.S. invasion of Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q723917. VIAF identifies the subject as 2034913. The Library of Congress control number is no92015764. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1991, 1993 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Barr” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.