Donald Trump's Other Lawyer

Vastly more powerful than Rudy Giuliani, Attorney General William Barr is exercising the full force of the Justice Department to defend a president in crisis.

- Andrew Rice

Shortly before 5 p.m. on November 15, Attorney General William P. Barr arrived at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., his owlish face wearing a heavy expression. He and his entourage rushed by the lobby bar, where a television was tuned to CNN’s coverage of another day of damning impeachment hearings and raging presidential tweets. Inside a gilded ballroom, hundreds of conservative lawyers—many of them, like Barr, veterans of previous Republican administrations—were gathered to hear him deliver an address to the annual conference of the Federalist Society. “It will come as little surprise to this group,” Barr began, “that I’ve chosen to speak about the Constitution’s approach to executive power.” Even by the standards of this brazen era in Washington, in which all subtext is banished, the theme of the evening was a little on-the-nose—a startlingly explicit case for strengthening Donald Trump’s hold on American government.

“The grammar-school-civics-class version of our Revolution is that it was a rebellion against monarchical tyranny, and that in framing our Constitution, one of the preoccupations, the main preoccupation of the Founders, was to keep the executive weak,” Barr told the audience. “This is misguided.” Instead, Barr advocates for what is known as the “unitary executive theory,” which challenges the long-established doctrine that the president’s control over his branch of government is shared, to some degree, with Congress and the courts. “Whenever I see a court opinion that uses the word share,” Barr said, “I want to run in the other direction.” Critics say that in its maximalist form, the theory is a license for authoritarianism—a concern that Barr dismissed with ridicule.