---
alias:
- W. Lee Rawls
- William Lee Rawls
category: Law Enforcement & Legal
created: 2026-09-22
died: 2010-12
location: Washington, D.C.
summary: Justice Department legislative affairs chief under Thornburgh who advised
  him how to thwart the House Banking Committee's BNL inquiry and corresponded with
  the House Judiciary Committee during its INSLAW investigation; later chief of staff
  to Senator Frist and to FBI Director Mueller.
tags:
- Person
- LeeRawls
- DOJ
- BNL
- INSLAW
- Senate
- FBI
updated: 2026-09-22
---

W. Lee Rawls (Newport, Rhode Island, to December 2010, aged 66) was the [Department of Justice](/organizations/department-of-justice/)'s assistant attorney general for legislative affairs under [Richard Thornburgh](/people/richard-thornburgh/), the department's liaison to Congress in the years when the House Committee on the Judiciary under [Jack Brooks](/people/jack-brooks/) was demanding [INSLAW](/organizations/inslaw/) documents and the House Banking Committee under Henry Gonzalez was opening its inquiry into the [Banca Nazionale del Lavoro](/organizations/banca-nazionale-del-lavoro/) loans to [Iraq](/places/iraq/). A Princeton graduate of 1966 with a law degree from George Washington University, he began as a legislative specialist at the Environmental Protection Agency, was chief of staff to Senator Pete Domenici by 1975, and served as staff director of the Senate Judiciary Committee before joining the department.[^1]

### Thornburgh's Congress Man

In 1990, as Gonzalez prepared a full-scale investigation of the Atlanta branch of BNL, Rawls wrote Thornburgh a briefing memorandum: "Our best attempt to thwart any further congressional inquiry by the House Banking Committee into this case is to have you contact Chairman Gonzalez directly." Gonzalez declined to take the attorney general's call, and Thornburgh wrote to him of his "profound disappointment." In May and July 1991 Rawls corresponded on the department's behalf with the House Judiciary Committee during its INSLAW investigation.[^2][^3]

### Later Career

Rawls was chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist from 2003 to 2005 and then chief of staff and senior counsel to [FBI](/organizations/federal-bureau-of-investigation/) Director [Robert Mueller](/people/robert-mueller/) until 2009. In private practice he was a partner at Vinson & Elkins and managing partner of the Washington office of Howard Baker's firm, Baker Donelson; he taught at the National Defense University and the College of William and Mary, was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, and in 2009 published In Praise of Deadlock, a defense of the Senate filibuster. He died of acute leukemia in December 2010.[^1]

[^1]: "W. Lee Rawls, Justice Department official and Senate aide," obituary, *The Washington Post,* December 2010; Princeton Alumni Weekly memorial, Class of 1966; "Lee Rawls, Former Chief of Staff to FBI Director Mueller, Dies," *Tickle the Wire,* December 2010. The three obituaries agree on the career; none was opened in full, and the biographical details rest on their summaries.
[^2]: Friedman, Alan. *Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq,* Bantam, 1993, pp. 193-194.
[^3]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. *The INSLAW Affair,* H. Rept. 102-857, September 10, 1992, correspondence of May and July 1991 (the letters' contents were not examined). https://archive.org/details/InslawAffairInvestigativeReport