M Kfivethousand
2023-07-18 02:52:29 UTC
A few days ago i was telling someone about barr and how he virtually ignored hannsen the superspy
The name boyden gray sounded familiar
“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[…]” “ “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”
Excerpt From
American Kompromat
Craig Unger
The name boyden gray sounded familiar
“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[…]” “ “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”
Excerpt From
American Kompromat
Craig Unger