New York Times: “The move illustrates Mr. Barr’s swift rise in the pantheon of President Trump’s most prominent and loyal allies — and in the eyes of Mr. Trump himself. In a cabinet stocked with government neophytes and placeholders, the deeply experienced Mr. Barr is quickly emerging as the most influential figure in the second half of Mr. Trump’s term.”

“But his rising power over the intelligence community has been accompanied by swelling disillusionment with Mr. Barr among former national security officials and ideological moderates. When he agreed late last year to take the job, many of them had cast him as a Republican straight shooter, steeped in pre-Trump mores, who would restrain an impetuous president.”

“Now they see in him someone who has glossed over Mr. Trump’s misdeeds, smeared his investigators and positioned himself to possibly declassify information for political gain — not the Bill Barr they thought they knew.”

Jonathan Chait: “After the legal Establishment had granted him the benefit of the doubt, Attorney General William Barr has shocked his erstwhile supporters with his aggressive and frequently dishonest interventions on behalf of President Trump. The spectacle of an esteemed lawyer abetting his would-be strongman boss’s every authoritarian instinct has left Barr’s critics grasping for explanations. Some have seized on the darker threads of his history in the Reagan and Bush administrations, when he misled the public about a secret Department of Justice memo and helped cover up the Iran-Contra scandal.”

“But Barr’s long, detailed interview with Jan Crawford suggests the rot goes much deeper than a simple mania for untrammeled Executive power. Barr has drunk deep from the Fox News worldview of Trumpian paranoia.”

“It is hard to convey how far over the edge Barr has gone without reading the entire interview, which lasted an hour.”

“I am at the end of my career. Everyone dies and I am not, you know, I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that you know, immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries, you know?”

— Attorney General William Barr, in a CBS News interview, on whether his reputation is being damaged working for President Trump.

Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that he is trying to get to the bottom of whether or not “government officials abused their power and put their thumb on the scale” during the early stages of the Russia probe.

Said Barr: “I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together, in a sense I have more questions today than when I first started.”

He added: “People have to find out what the government was doing during that period. If we’re worried about foreign influence, for the very same reason we should be worried about whether government officials abuse their power and put their thumb on the scale.”

Barr was even stronger in a Wall Street Journal interview: “Government power was used to spy on American citizens. I can’t imagine any world where we wouldn’t take a look and make sure that was done properly.”

Benjamin Wittes: “It has been catastrophic. Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case it is true.”

“Barr has consistently sought to spin his department’s work in a highly political fashion, and he has done so to cast the president’s conduct in the most favorable possible light. Trump serially complained that Jeff Sessions didn’t act to ‘protect’ him. Matthew Whitaker never had the stature or internal clout to do so effectively. In Barr, Trump has found his man.”

Playbook: “It’s bad for democracy to have an administration ignore the will of a co-equal branch of government. Barr opposes answering questions from a staff attorney, but — as Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York says — it cannot be up to the administration to decide how Congress conducts its business. This is all a mess.”

Andrew Cohen: “There’s no great mystery about what Attorney General William Barr did Wednesday during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He knows that Senate Democrats don’t have the votes or the power to do anything substantial to impair his tragic choice to protect President Trump from the substantiated allegations against him. And so the nation’s chief law enforcement official and top prosecutor, at taxpayer expense, spent hours spinning like a defense attorney with his client’s liberty on the line. If every prosecutor was so keen to forgive and forget compelling evidence of criminal conduct the nation’s prisons would be empty.”

“It was as disgraceful a performance by an attorney general as I have seen in 22 years as a legal analyst and commentator. And I say that having extensively covered the hapless appearances of Alberto Gonzales. He was the attorney general at the heart of the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorney scandal a decade ago. At least he had the excuse of being as dumb as a rock. Barr is no dummy. He knows precisely what he’s doing. His audience is an audience of one. It always has been. And he made it clear Wednesday, as if it had not been before, that he is no honest broker for the Justice Department. He’s just another hack.”

First Read: “If Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton was a 3.0 on the political Richter scale, then special counsel Robert Mueller’s complaint about Trump Attorney General William Barr’s summary of his report on Russian interference is an 8.5. At least.”

“And guess what: Barr testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at 10:00 am ET.”

“Democrats have a decision to make: Do they focus their fire on Barr, with some Democrats and 2020ers calling for the attorney general’s impeachment? Or do they keep the impeachment focus on Trump? Or all of the above?”

William Barr said in a 1998 interview that he was “disturbed” that Attorney General Janet Reno had not defended independent counsel Ken Starr from “spin control,” “hatchet jobs” and “ad hominem attacks,” CNN reports.

“Two decades later, Barr is now attorney general himself — and defending another president who has repeatedly blasted a special counsel’s investigation of his activities. Barr stayed silent as President Donald Trump railed against special counsel Robert Mueller’s ‘witch hunt.'”