WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday chose William Barr as his next attorney general.
Barr, who spent two years from 1991 through 1993 as attorney general under Republican President George H.W. Bush, would succeed acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker if confirmed. Whitaker took over the job for Jeff Sessions, who was pushed out by Trump.
“He was my first choice since Day One,” Trump said of Barr, who has most recently worked in the Washington office of the law firm Kirkland & Ellis.
Barr worked at the CIA in the 1970s and served in several leadership roles at the Justice Department, including his years as attorney general under Bush.
During that period, the Justice Department aggressively pursued obscenity cases, with the help of Patrick Trueman, who was chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
During the Bush years, the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section helped take down seven adult distributors. The prized catch was Reuben Sturman, who eventually pleaded guilty in 1992 to racketeering and shipping obscene materials across state lines. He died in 1997.
Trueman, who testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee in March 2005, said that in the early 1990s, during his time at the Justice Department focusing solely on obscenity prosecutions, the agency collected more than $24 million in fines and forfeitures, there were 50 individual or corporate convictions of sending obscene advertisements through the mail and there was a “Los Angeles project” that he said led to the conviction of 20 out of 50 producers and suppliers of obscene materials targeted in the metropolitan area.
Trueman now serves as CEO at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, spearheading numerous antiporn initiatives.
This afternoon, XBIZ checked in with a number of adult industry attorneys to learn their opinions on what to expect of Barr, if he is confirmed, to the top-cop spot. Here’s what they had to say:
Lawrence Walters
William Barr was the attorney general under the Bush 41 presidency and was active in pursuing obscenity prosecutions during that time. His priorities may be different this time; however, old habits die slow. The hostility being demonstrated towards adult content with the recent Tumblr and Facebook bans is reflective of a new political climate for the adult industry. It is too early to know whether the industry will be targeted again, but there is cause for concern.
Clyde DeWitt
I suppose what everyone is concerned about is the fact that General Barr’s tenure was during the last year or so of the Bush 41 administration, which was the last year or so of the federal obscenity prosecutions that started with the Meese Commission and for the most part ended when Bill Clinton assumed office. But that was over a quarter of a century ago.
Times obviously have changed substantially since then. When the Reagan DOJ went after the adult video industry, the number of adult manufacturers numbered maybe a couple of dozen, most all in the San Fernando Valley. Meese actually believed (or at least professed to believe) that the DOJ could create an obscenity strike force that could wipe from the face of the earth all of those companies and all of their videotapes. (Do you even remember VHS?).
Now, it is pretty safe to say that adult motion picture production goes on in all 50 states; sexually explicit websites are all over the world, and the internet has no borders. Porn will be ubiquitous no matter what the DOJ tries to do about it, and I don’t think that the evangelicals (née the religious right) think otherwise.
Another factor is the Trump administration would become a laughingstock if it tried to prosecute porn when almost everyone in America believes that The Donald was rolling in the hay with a porn star and then paid her to keep quiet.
Barr’s passion is to have Roe v. Wade overturned. He also is a strong believer in executive power, which translates in part to allowing Trump to order the Justice Department around, which in turn translates into closing down the Mueller investigation. But the Mueller investigation is nothing compared to what the House of Representatives is going to do beginning the first of the year.
Corey D. Silverstein
Same song different channel. The attorney general may be new but Trump himself has shown no interest in obscenity prosecutions. I suspect that the attorney general will have his hands full with the current chaos of internal investigations, international meddling, FBI probes and more.
J.D. Obenberger
The odds have just incrementally risen that another effort, bipartisan initiative to insulate kids from hard core pornography, will emerge if Mr. Barr takes charge at Justice. It's an issue he was vitally concerned with last time.
In the end, COPA went nowhere except adrift in the wind from a wildly theoretical, confusing, split and fractured decision of the Supreme Court and the momentum of that effort was lost. But, in the intervening years, on the other side of the Atlantic, the U.K. and others keep working to keep their children from hardcore and enact regulations that the American producers have had to learn about.
Some years ago, the U.S. National Science Foundation released surprising numbers about the demographics of mid-teen porn consumption (large and about equal between the sexes during high school age) and this continues to concern segments of U.S. society broader than the biblethumpers.
There's no real reason to predict any renewed interest in general obscenity prosecution, and I don't think it's likely under President Trump no matter who serves as his AG. But no one should be surprised if there will be new congressional attempts to keep children and hardcore apart in the U.S. that get written by a Barr team at DOJ.
