I was once at a dinner attended by Attorney General William Barr. A conservative journalist who was also there pressed him in a voice heavy with frustration to pursue conspiratorial lines of inquiry against President Trump’s perceived enemies. Barr is polite and low-key almost to a fault, but he eventually tired of this sniping, looked his interlocutor in the eye, and asked, “Do you think I’m stupid?”

His unusually withering dismissal of an intemperate right-winger comes to mind now that Washington is in ferment over accusations that Barr is Trump’s sock puppet — “wingman” is how Eric Holder described his own relationship with President Barack Obama — and is thereby undermining the Department of Justice.