Bill Barr: The “Cover-Up General” The Village Voice | OCT 27, 1992 [eta reprinted online APR 18, 2019]
...But as Bush launched his presidential bid in 1988, Barr joined the campaign team and, among other things, helped fend off attacks on Dan Quayle’s character. His loyalty was quickly repaid. In late 1988, Barr became the first assistant attorney general to be installed in the wake of the election.
He also began flexing his ideology in public. During a congressional hearing at the time he boldly acknowledged having “doubts” about the constitutionality of the independent counsel statutes because of what he saw as their limiting effect on presidential power.
For the next two years, as chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Barr played a key role in shaping Richard Thornburgh’s stormy tenure as attorney general. In a job that was essentially political, he helped maintain the administration’s ideological purity by screening out judicial candidates who weren’t conservative enough. He also drafted two key documents rationalizing the U.S. invasion of Panama and the seizure of General Manuel Noriega.
If Barr had made no other contribution to the imperial pretensions of George Bush, these documents would nevertheless qualify him for hero status in the Republican pantheon. The first “opinion,” written in June 1989, recognized the president’s right to dispatch FBI agents abroad to arrest foreigners even in violation of international treaties. The second document, issued the following December as American forces geared up to invade Panama, gave a patina of legality to the president’s desire to use the military in similar takedown operations. Together, the two memos enshrine what has come to be known as the president’s “snatch authority.”
In an inevitable seignorial flourish, the administration refused to release the complete contents of these documents, even to Congress. But over the years, enough of their flavor has seeped into the press to take one’s breath away. Writing in the June memo, Barr argued that both the president and, through him, the attorney general have an “inherent constitutional power” to authorize certain overseas operations, including abductions, to fend off “serious threats” to U.S. domestic “security” from “international terrorist groups and narcotics traffickers.” Such actions, he said, are mandated by the Constitution and domestic law and can be undertaken even in the face of objections from a foreign government or provisions of the UN Charter barring the use of force against member nations.
Emphasis mine. No wonder Barr sees no problem in personally running around overseas doing whatever it is he's doing. There's more covered in the article - BCCI, Inslaw (PROMIS) and Iraqgate. It's been a while since the Bush I era. So much has happened since, it's been less on the mind of the general public, especially since the overall quality of media coverage has steadily deteriorated since then.
The man is a menace.
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