WASHINGTON — Attorney General William P. Barr on Wednesday answered questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee on Robert S. Mueller III’s report, appearing on Capitol Hill for the first time since he made the report public.

The hearing was expected to be the first of two appearances on back-to-back days, but later on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that Mr. Barr was expected to skip his planned testimony on Thursday. Mr. Barr objects to Democrats’ plans to have a staff lawyer question him.

Here are the highlights of his testimony on Wednesday.

In a dispute with Mueller, Barr shifted blame .

Democrats pressed Mr. Barr on a letter that Mr. Mueller wrote in March accusing him of failing to capture “the context, nature and substance” of the special counsel’s report in outlining its findings weeks before releasing the document. They accused Mr. Barr of obfuscation and outright lying because he made no mention of the letter when asked in congressional testimony last month about reports that investigators were dismayed about how he portrayed their findings.

[Read the letter here.]

Mr. Barr tried to redirect the conversation to Mr. Mueller’s complaints in a phone call about news coverage of Mr. Barr’s March 24 letter summarizing the investigation’s conclusions. And when asked about his earlier testimony, he said that he viewed a question about Mr. Mueller’s investigators being upset as different from a question about Mr. Mueller himself being upset. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, called that response “masterful hairsplitting.”