Barbara Olson (December 27, 1955 – September 11, 2001) was a lawyer and conservative American television commentator who worked for CNN, Fox News Channel, and several other outlets. She was a passenger on American Airlines Flight 77 en route to a taping of Bill Maher's television show Politically Incorrect when it was flown into the Pentagon in the September 11 attacks.

Olson was born Barbara Kay Bracher in Houston, Texas. (Her older sister, Toni Bracher-Lawrence, has been a member of the Houston City Council since 2004.) She graduated from Waltrip High School and earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Saint Thomas in Houston. She earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

As a newcomer, she achieved a surprising measure of success, working for HBO and Stacey Keach Productions.^[when?] In the early 1990s, she worked as an associate at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Wilmer Cutler & Pickering where she did civil litigation for several years before becoming an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

Barbara Jill Walters (born September 25, 1929) is an American broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She has hosted morning television shows (Today and The View), the television news magazine (20/20), former co-anchor of the ABC World News, and current contributor to ABC News.

Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later hosts Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's news magazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News, and continuing as a contributor to the network news division and its flagship program, ABC World News.

In 1996, Walters was ranked #34 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time.

Walters was born in 1929 in Boston, the daughter of Dena (née Seletsky) and Louis "Lou" Walters (born Louis Warmwater). Her parents were both Jewish and descendants of refugees from the former Russian Empire, now Eastern Europe. Walters' paternal grandfather, Abraham Isaac, was from what is now Łódź, Poland, and first immigrated to England, changing his name first to Warmwater and later to Abraham Walters (the original family surname was Waremwasser). Walters' father was born there c. 1894, and moved to the United States with his family in 1900. In 1937, her father opened the New York version of the Latin Quarter; he also worked as a Broadway producer (he produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943). He also was the Entertainment Director for the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he imported the "Folies Bergere" stage show from Paris to the resort's main showroom. Walters' brother, Burton, died in 1932 of pneumonia. Walters' elder sister, Jacqueline, was born mentally disabled and died of ovarian cancer in 1985. She has another half sister, Walda Walters Anderson, born to a different mother.^{[citation needed]}

Theodore Bevry Olson (born September 11, 1940) is an American lawyer, practicing at the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Olson served as United States Solicitor General from June 2001 to July 2004 under President George W. Bush.

Theodore Olson was born in Chicago and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in Mountain View, California. He graduated from Los Altos High in 1958, completed his undergraduate degree at the University of the Pacific, and earned a law degree from Boalt Hall.

Olson practiced law first as an associate and then as a partner in the Los Angeles, California office of the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. He then served as an Assistant Attorney General (Office of Legal Counsel) in the Reagan administration before returning to private practice as a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of his former law firm. While serving in the Reagan administration, Olson defended President Reagan during the Iran-Contra affair.

Olson represented convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard while he was in private practice. In Pollard's appeal to United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Olson argued the life sentence Pollard received was in violation of the plea bargain agreement, which had specifically excluded a life sentence. Olson also argued that the violation of the plea bargain was grounds for a mistrial. The Court of Appeals ruled (2-1) that no grounds for mistrial existed.