“He is the closest thing we have to Dick Cheney,” said a former senior Justice Department official, referring to President George W. Bush’s unusually powerful vice president. “He is a strong-willed man with a forceful personality” and “well-formed, deeply studied views,” the official added.

A Times examination of Mr. Barr’s record, combined with interviews of more than two dozen associates, suggests that he is neither as apolitical as his defenders claim, nor as partisan as his detractors fear.

Related: A newly released recording from 2017 shows that a lawyer for Mr. Trump, John Dowd, broached the prospect of a pardon for one of the president’s former aides. Investigators for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, declined to question Mr. Dowd about his message, citing “attorney-client-privilege issues.”

Evangelicals face a reckoning

Nearly 400 Southern Baptist leaders have pleaded guilty or were convicted of sex crimes since 1998, according to a recent investigation by two Texas newspapers.

Evangelical churches have long distanced themselves from the sexual abuse crisis that has consumed the Roman Catholic Church, but the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., has promised to address the problem this week at its annual gathering.