Barr appreciates power, and he knows how to wield it. In fact, Barr could hardly have been more explicit in indicating what he believed and what he would do when the president sent him to the Justice Department. “I think it started picking up after Watergate,” Barr said in a 2001 interview for a University of Virginia oral-history project on the first Bush administration, “the idea that the Department of Justice has to be ‘independent.’”