gentlemen and welcome to the richard nixon library and museum. and i'm christopher nixon cox a board member here at the nixon foundation and is my middle name implies the grandson of president richard nixon. and patricia ryan nixon and i want to say the proud grandson of richard nixon. thank you so much for being here tonight for what i know will be a fascinating discussion. we are delighted to have you all here again in person not in front of a zoom camera or computer. over the years we've had the honor to host many distinguished guests here in yorba linda. we have never however had the opportunity to welcome someone who has served as attorney general of the united states. not once but twice and not in one presidential administration, but in two presidential administrations separated by 25 years. pretty unique this is that is a unique distinction in american history and it says a great deal about william barr's patriotism and his commitment to public service. and perhaps his two tours of duty as attorney general under two very different presidents were the inspiration of his book one -- thing after another. our guest of honor tonight has had a very distinguished career in both the public and private sectors. he began government service in the administration of president reagan as a member of the white house domestic policy staff from 1982 to 1983. after several years in private practice. he returned to government and president george h w bush's administration serving as assistant attorney general the office of legal counsel. next is deputy attorney general and then is the 77th attorney general of the united states from 1991 to 1993. he returned to the private sector where from 1994 to 2017. he enjoyed great success and earned enormous respect as one of the nation's preeminent legal minds and i'm sure he didn't have to deal with as many -- things in the private sector. then in 2018 when he was undoubtedly enjoying the fruits of a long and successful career. he answered our country's call once again when president trump nominated him and the senate confirms him as the 85th attorney general of the united states. his book one -- thing after another debuted last month at number one on the new york times bestseller list and to date has remained on the list for the last five weeks so i know tonight we're going to keep it on the list for a sixth week because not only will you all buy a book for your cells. this is going to make great summer reading. so get a book for all of your friends here tonight, and we're gonna keep it on the list one one more week for sure. and if you need any more reason to go out and get this book one reviewer wrote of the book, this is an incredible story of the life of a great public servant. so many lessons about how government works and how public service operates at its finest. this was a courageous book to write and i couldn't put it down. i think that is each of you reads. this book. you will come to the exact same conclusion. we are also very fortunate tonight to have joining us professor matt parlow the executive vice president chief advancement officer and parker s. kennedy professor of law at chapman university. but yes round of applause for that. professor parlow earned his jd from yale law school after which he served as a clerk for the us court of appeals for the ninth circuit and then in private practice. to the good fortune a students first at marquette law school and now at chapman professor parlo left private practice for academia voted professor of the year at each school. he is enriched the studies and minds of countless future attorneys. professor parlow is also served on the boards of several nonprofits as well as on a number of state and local government task forces. in addition, he consults with several professional sports leagues and teams, which makes in my new best friend and i hope that he enjoys this introduction so he can take me to visit some of those professional sports teams. the nixon foundation of course is established a great partnership with chapman university, which is led by jim byron the president of the nixon foundation and a proud graduate of chapman. among the many benefits of that partnership is having professor parlow here with us this evening to discuss attorney general barr's book with him. now i know tonight's conversation between attorney general bar and professor parlow will be lively informative and fascinating. so please join me in welcoming the 77th and 85th attorney general of the united states william p bar and professor, matt harlow. thank you very much. thank you. thank you very much. thank you. general barton honor to be with you here tonight. i'm honored to be here at the library and i appreciate everyone coming out this evening. them to the land of $7 gas. so let's jump in at your second attorney general stint. you had a great life in retirement. the book talks about all the interests and things you were doing the balance and being able to do consulting and have lots of time for family and other interesting things. what called you back into public service? i thought we were at a critical juncture in our history. i felt the 2016 election. was absolutely essential to win. i was worried for the republicans. i was worried that the progressives were pretty close to pushing the country over the cliff into the abyss from which it would be very hard to ever recover. and trump turned out to be i didn't originally i was never a never trump or i didn't support him initially. i supported one of the other candidates, but i was happy to support him once won the nomination. and i think that his policies were were excellent policies were which were just what the country needed. but i felt that. the democrats were trying to hobble his administration with this russia gate thing, which i was skeptical about. it didn't add up completely to me. and i was worried that we were headed toward a constitutional crisis the department of justice and the fbi were in turmoil. and you know, i had lost a lot of credibility with the american people and those are two institutions that i loved and and think are very important in our system. so originally i i started pushing other people out in front of me to try to get the white house interested in other candidates, but none of them really gained any traction. and the president wanted to talk to me and i didn't want to talk to him unless i knew i was willing to accept the job. i didn't want to waste his time and and so we had a discussion in the family and people agreed that you know, if this was something i was asked to do i really should do it. i felt that. as i say we were headed toward very dangerous waters as a country and my friend bob gates who i have immense respect for who had been this secretary defense and and then when i first served as attorney general had been the head of cia. he said look, you know you're serving the country and and we're you know, we're facing a lot of challenges and what's important. is that the best people serve in these jobs people who know what they're doing so that's the reason i took the job. the the one of the most interesting things i've seen written or said about the book is our friend of the nixon library hugh hewitt said that your book may be the the fairest assessment of president trump that he's read. can you talk a little bit about your your sort of relationship with him and your your assessment of of him as a president? i was never under any illusions about trump's persona and you know how difficult it was to. deal with him. i had never met him before although i had worked in new york for 15 years as general counsel of gte and then verizon corporation and most of my business friends who knew him some very well and had worked for them told me he was very difficult person and advised me not to go into his ministry. so i was under no illusion about that. i wasn't going in to be his best buddy or to build a you know, a friendship with him. i was in there to serve his administration as attorney general and try to help his administration succeed. and and a personal level we hit it off very well, you know we both grew up in new york around the roughly the same time. he's a little bit older than i am and i thought we had an easy rapport and i talked very bluntly and directly and vice verse can assure you. i also felt that he that his policies were generally sound and many of his policy instincts were were good. and i think what people view as some of his downsides in which occasionally were his downsides. also served them well at other times i think perhaps in 2016. it took someone has pugnacious as aggressive as a direct as he was to surmount the media the media's hostility and get his message out and also to tangle with the organized left-wing attacks against them and to stand up against them. so those and also to push his policies through the bureaucracy and the resistance in washington. so these were things that help them win the election at the time and helped him get things done like taking control of the border, which was a slug hard slog for, you know for four years, eventually succeed. but he also his style. could be very excessive and alienated a lot of key voters and and his advisors including me kept on telling him that he should dial it back a little bit especially in 2020 as we went into the election year and there were some friction between us during 2020 at into a head in which i explained in the book. i want to come back to that you are talking just now about public service and you you start out your career and work in the cia, but then you decide to go to law school what drew you to a career in the law? my mother i had always wanted to be in high school in the 11th grade you when you met with your college advisor counselor or whatever. he said what's your career goal, and i said to be director of the cia and he almost fell out of his chair. this was during the vietnam war. so it wasn't that. you know obvious a choice, but and i went to columbia. i studied chinese i got my master's degree in government and chinese studies because i figured everyone else was studying russia. and the other long-term rival was china. which i felt over the long term would be the more serious challenge. so that's why i went into chinese studies. and as we all know president nixon went to china and all of a sudden china was the craze and the cia was knocking on my door. and and that's why i went in the cia but meanwhile and i worked part-time there for two summers before i joined up. and my mother said, you know being a child of the depression. she said you know you need to profession you need a career you need something to fall back on. go to law school. my father said nah do what you like to do because that's what you'll do best. so i so i went to the cia and i went to law school at night and later on under jimmy when jimmy carter won the election and appointed someone i didn't think was a good director. i laughed but having gone to cia. through a series of remarkable coincidences. i was brought i was brought in i would they elevated me to the legislative office to help work on all these investigations of the cia and that way i met the director george h w bush who had come to head the cia. he had been the ambassador to china. came to head to cia and i established my relationship with bush. i was 26 years old at the time and that relationship was obviously. pivotal in my life because he eventually made me attorney general. he served in that role for a year if i recall. yeah, he was in that role as a head of cia for one year and during this time. the cia was under investigation by six committees and one commission. this was for alleged. excesses during the cold war things like attempted or successful assassinations and things like that. and so he had to defend the agency during the time where everyone was trying to tear it apart. and he did such a great job in that one year and he won the respect of the agency professionals who are the old-time cold warriors in those days? that they named the cia campus and building after him. it's the george hw bush intelligence center. so that's the kind of impact. it could have even just one year in the job. you your doj. you're the number two there. you become acting attorney general and attorney general thornburg gets convinced to run for senate when the unfortunate death of senator heinz. it was supposed to be the the dog days in washington right in august sleepy time, but you you had to deal with a very major issue early on with it prison, talladega. you tell the the audience about that story. that was a really compelling part of the book for me. yeah. so, you know, i initially had justice. bush put me in as the head of the office of legal counsel, which is like a legal beagles office. i call it the egg heads of the department. we give the constitutional advice. and i only have that job for years a fantastic job, and they made me number two, which is the chief operating officer the deputy attorney general. and then -- thornburg had to go and and run for the senate because john heinz had been killed in a plane crash. and the president said look. we'll make the decision about who's going to be the permanent attorney general after clarence. thomas gets confirmed. but you just hold the fort is acting attorney general until that happens. so i was acting attorney general in august. and 120 mario leto cubans, who? where the hardest core sociopaths that had come over when fidel castro had opened up his prisons and led a lot of criminals come over here in connection with the mariel boatlift. these were people had been over here for a long time had committed serious crimes over here and we were getting ready to ship them back to cuba fidel castro would agreed to take them and they thought probably with some good reason that they would die if they went back to cuba, but we had them in a federal prison 120 of them and they took over the prison seized 11 harstriches. and this i was confronted with the head of prisons comes in and and and and the prison unit is like a fortress you couldn't see and it was solid concrete big metal gates and so forth and a long story short. i realized that we could never give in to their demands their demands were to stay in the united states. they would rather be in a federal prison and go back to cuba. and i knew we couldn't give in and that eventually we were going to have to do a hostage rescue. and so i activated the each rt the house address key team of the fbi and they started immediately training and planning for an operation. i worked very closely with the top guys in the fbi. on this and after nine days, we hadn't fed them or anything. it's a very interesting story. it's the kind of thing. you can make a good movie about actually as long but john can't once john candy died. there was no one left to play me. yeah, but although i hear on twitter that that john goodman. but anyway sorry, finally, you know, i i gave the order to conduct the hostage rescue and it was implemented at 4 am in the morning and it was all very dramatic. you know, there were some last-minute curve balls as to whether we were gonna get in there and actually be able to find the hostages and time. because they had knives and they had started playing russian roulette by putting their names in a bag and stuff like that. but anyway, they it was a success it took less than 90 again took less than a minute to reach the hostages and and they were all rescued and so that was an interesting thing and when people say to me, you know, what was the most satisfying thing you did as attorney general certainly in the first tour. that was it. it wasn't that much to do with law books or anything like that, but when i went down there that morning you know how i met all the hostages and their families and it was you know, the most meaningful thing that i did was to do that because their lives were at stake shortly thereafter. the president appointed decided he was going to appoint me as as attorney general. and when you entered the oval office to have that conversation with him you said to him mr. president? i appreciate this is i don't bring you much politically do can you tell the audience what he said back to you? yeah, so after a cabinet meeting i was waved in and johnson new who was the chief of staff at that time said look bill. here's the deal. he wants to go with you steady hand at the tiller and all that stuff, but you don't get him anything politically because the other people at that time being considered were george duke agent who you know, obviously and and john ashcroft to governors or former governors and he said but so we're going to pick your deputy and i hope that's not a problem. i said, well, actually i'm not crazy with anything. so well, you better tell him about that so when he offered me the job. okay, i'm very excited. you know, i mean look, you know, have you as my attorney general, i guess john told you about that other thing. i assume that's not a problem. i said, well actually it is a problem mr. president. oh, and i said look the department of justice if there's any daylight between the attorney general and the deputy you're gonna have turmoil in the department and and you know, the people they just cripple the political level level of leadership that way. and and he was looking at me and i said, let me put it this way mr. president. the attorney general's bulls are in the deputies pocket, and i'm not going to and i'm not putting mine in anyone's pocket who i don't know. this this look of came over as oh, okay. you have someone in mind and i said, yes i said, okay fine. you talk talk to some other people if we have someone to free to talk to fine, but if you still want to go with your guy, that's fine, too. and that was that was that. he also said to you the best politics at doj is no politics in doj and in reading your book that seems to be actually your ethos. you may be reflect a little bit on maybe that there's being a shared value between me you and president bush, right, you know, the attorney general performs a number of different functions, you know one is providing legal advice. and they are you're you are acting as a political official who was politically. sympathetic to the administration and you try to give advice that will you know be in accord with law but also from the standpoint of trying to help the administration get to where it wants to go within the law. the other is as a policy advisor and executing programs like fighting drugs or crime and so forth. that's a political position president wants to do something for political reasons in the crime arena fine. there's nothing wrong with the attorney general acting that way. but the thing that's really sacrosanct in the department of justice. is the enforcement of the criminal law and trying to make sure that there are not different standards for different people depending on what party they're in or anything else about them. the same law has to apply to everyone now. i like i think most of you believe that we've moved away from that and that in fact in practice. we do have two standards of justice. and but that's what the president men when he said that the best. polity when i said, you know, i know i don't get you anything political mr. president. he said the best politics at the justice department is no politics. and that's what he meant by that and and agree with that. and i tried my best to apply one standard for everybody and not allow politics to be played if i didn't have the evidence. sufficient to indict someone whether it be james, call me or anyone else the president would publicly declare should be indicted by the way if biden went around right now. saying you know, this person should be indicted in this prayer which he has with respect to the presi