This was a contentious position to take, and Barr was asked to provide the memo offering the detailed legal rationale for allowing such detentions. He declined, instead offering a 13-page document that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” When Congress, and then The Washington Post, obtained the full opinion in 1991, it was quickly noted that several conclusions from the full document hadn’t been included in Barr’s summary. Foremost among them was that the opinion authorized the president of the United States to ignore the United Nations Charter.

Goodman quotes professor Jeanne Woods, who wrote in a 1996 Boston University law journal that “Barr’s congressional testimony attempted to gloss over the broad legal and policy changes that his written opinion advocated.”

As Goodman told the Post on Monday, the 1989 situation “breeds a lot of distrust of relying on Barr’s assurances that he’s handling this process in a way that’s faithful to the principles that he’s announced and will let the public know what the public should know.” Asked if he believed Barr acted in good faith at the time, Goodman said, “I think it’s difficult to imagine that Barr didn’t know what he was doing in failing to inform the Congress that he had concluded that the president of the United States could violate the U.N. Charter. In fact, that proposition has proved to be highly controversial ever since the O.L.C. opinion was publicly released and significant executive branch practice turns on that proposition.”

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— What happens if Trump realizes that Stephen Miller is the border crisis?

— How the L.A. Times rose from the near-dead

— Is the Biden campaign dead on arrival?

— Did China create a racist A.I. to track Muslims?

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hive newsletter and never miss a story.