Democrats repeatedly admonished Attorney General William Barr at a contentious Senate hearing Wednesday, accusing him of bias and lying, and even calling for his resignation.

Barr’s response to many of those salvos? Throw others under the bus.

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The pass-the-buck approach spared few over four-plus hours of questioning about Barr’s handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. A POLITICO tally of the transcript counted more than 30 times where the attorney general redirected the criticism, with a number of figures ending up as collateral casualties.

Here’s a breakdown of who took the brunt of Barr’s blame:

Robert Mueller

Barr and Mueller have been friends for more than three decades, but that relationship mattered little from the very start of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

In his opening statement, the attorney general shredded Mueller over the sheer volume of material the special counsel turned in last month at the conclusion of his investigation, creating a predicament that Barr said forced him to buy time with his controversial release of top-line findings while the Justice Department and special counsel lawyers reviewed all the potential redactions.

“The body politic,” Barr explained, “was in a high state of agitation.”

Barr also faulted Mueller for handing in executive summaries that weren’t ready for prime time because they still contained sensitive material dealing with intelligence issues. “I made it clear to him I was not in the business of putting out periodic summaries because a summary would start a whole public debate” about its accuracy, Barr said.

The attorney general second-guessed several other Mueller decisions, explaining that he was, “frankly, surprised” with the special counsel’s punt on the pivotal question of whether President Donald Trump should be charged for obstruction of justice. He also scoffed at Mueller’s declaration that the president was not cleared of charges.

“We’re not in the business of exoneration,” the attorney general said.

There was more, too. Barr questioned why Mueller dug into “additional episodes” of Trump’s possible obstruction given the special counsel’s lack of prosecutorial firepower when it comes to the president.

“I think that if he felt that he shouldn’t go down the path of making a traditional prosecutive decision, he shouldn’t have investigated it,” Barr said. “That was the time to pull up.”

Mueller’s prosecutors

Barr didn’t criticize just Mueller. He also pilloried the special counsel’s prosecutors — aka the “Angry Democrats” who have frequently been on the receiving end of Trump’s wrath.

Addressing Mueller’s complaint that the attorney general in his initial March 24 letter to Congress “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the special counsel’s work, Barr told senators he thought Mueller’s missive was “a bit snitty and I think it was probably written by one of his staff people.”

The attorney general also threw shade at Team Mueller during an exchange with Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) in which he was asked to assess a squad that included Justice Department veterans who prosecuted President Richard Nixon, the mafia, Islamic State terrorists and Enron executives. “Do you consider these lawyers to be the best and the brightest in the field?” Blackburn asked. “Not necessarily,” the attorney general replied.

In a follow-up, Blackburn asked, “Are they the warriors you would want on your side?” Again, Barr demurred: “I mean, I — there are a lot of great lawyers in the Department of Justice. He assembled a very competent team.”

Rod Rosenstein

Since stepping into his new job in February, Barr has repeatedly hugged close the departing deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein — particularly when dealing with the tricky wrap-up of Mueller’s investigation.

Each step of the way, Barr has stressed that the decisions he’s made regarding the Trump-Russia investigation were made jointly with Rosenstein or, at least, endorsed by him. The attorney general’s first letter to Congress announcing the end of the Mueller report, for example, declared that Rosenstein never rejected any significant step the special counsel wanted to take.

“I haven’t been the only decision-maker here. … He has 30 years experience,” Barr emphasized Wednesday.

In all, Barr mentioned Rosenstein more than a dozen times during the Senate hearing, underscoring how the two were in full agreement.

But at least some of the attorney general’s complaints about how Mueller carried out his task also seemed to amount to criticism of Rosenstein, with the attorney general stressing on numerous occasions just how closely the Justice Department’s No. 2 was overseeing the special counsel’s work during the past two years.

Despite Rosenstein’s supervision — “I know what he’s doing,” the deputy attorney general said of the special counsel in a House hearing in December 2017 — Barr suggested that Mueller essentially went rogue by refusing to make a decision about whether Trump obstructed justice.

“We don’t conduct criminal investigations to collect information and put it out to the public,” the attorney general said.

While Barr said he and Rosenstein were surprised by Mueller’s decision not to reach a conclusion on potential obstruction of justice by the president, the attorney general never explained how Rosenstein could have been keeping close tabs on the inquiry and still be blindsided by the special counsel’s decision to “pull up” without resolving such a critical question.

The FBI, the intelligence community and the Steele dossier

Barr went after the FBI, starting at the very top, acknowledging that he’d had a problem with how then-Director James Comey handled the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. “ I said so at the time,” the attorney general said.

Unidentified FBI officials also took it on the chin from Barr for failing to warn the Trump campaign about suspicions of Russian efforts to infiltrate its inner circle.

“Under these circumstances, one of the things that I can’t fathom is why it didn’t happen,” Barr said. “If you’re concerned about interference in the election and have substantial people involved in the campaign — you had three former U.S. attorneys there in the campaign — I don’t understand why the bureau would not have gone and given a defensive briefing,” Barr said.

However, after a lunch break while senators voted on the floor, Barr revised his comments a bit to note that soon after Trump secured the Republican nomination in the summer of 2016, his campaign received an FBI briefing about generic counterintelligence threats. But Barr said Trump’s camp should have been warned about the specific concerns regarding Russia’s outreach to people connected to his presidential bid.

“I was referring to the kind where you are told … you’re a specific target,” the attorney general said. “I have been told at the break that a lesser kind of briefing, a security briefing that generally discusses, in general, threats apparently was given to the campaign in August,” the attorney general said.

But having gotten in hot water a few weeks ago for his assertion that “spying did occur” on Trump’s campaign by the FBI, Barr was careful to make clear on Wednesday that he was not tarring the entire law enforcement agency.

Instead, Barr blamed “a few people at the top getting it into their heads that they know better than the American people,” and said FBI Director Chris Wray had “changed out” previous leaders who needed to go. “I don’t think … there is a bad culture in the FBI,” the attorney general said.

While Barr said he didn’t want to reach any conclusions on the FBI’s handling of the 2016 election investigation, under questioning from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the attorney general also seemed to endorse the idea that the FBI hid from the Justice Department the fact that it put Trump under investigation as a potential Russian asset or dupe.

“Would it be unusual to your knowledge to hide existence and results from their superiors?” Hawley asked

“Very unusual,” Barr said, agreeing with the freshman Republican that concealing such an investigation would lead to “no accountability” for the FBI’s actions.

Barr also said he harbored significant doubts about the accuracy of the so-called Steele dossier, the Democratic-funded private-investigation file that was part of what the FBI used to get surveillance warrants against Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) asked Barr whether he had confidence that the document was not Russian propaganda.

“No, I can’t state that,” Barr said. “That is one of the areas that I am reviewing. I’m concerned about it. And I don’t think it’s entirely speculative.”

The Obama administration

Barr was quick to pick up on Cornyn’s suggestion that the Obama administration allowed Russia’s malicious activities to flourish in the 2016 campaign by failing to act against Moscow.

“We need to ask the question: Why didn’t the Obama administration do more as early as 2014 in investigating Russian efforts to prepare to undermine and sow dissension in the 2016 U.S. election?” the Texas Republican said.

Barr used the opportunity to offer some praise for Mueller for the criminal indictments he brought against Russian military intelligence and the alleged online troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency.

“It is very impressive work that they did,” the attorney general said of the special counsel’s crew. “I was thinking to myself, if that had been done in the beginning of 2016, we would have been a lot further along.”

The Justice Department

The attorney general even fingered his own Justice Department for some of the decisions he’s come under fire for making.

Barr said he “assume[d]” the Justice Department released to The Washington Post a copy of Mueller’s letter asking that the attorney general speed up the public release of his report’s summaries and introductions.

He also singled out the department’s criminal division for asking him to obtain a waiver allowing him to participate in an investigation into a Malaysian development company being scrutinized for money laundering and an allegedly illegal $100,000 donation it made to a Trump-aligned political action committee.

“I didn’t seek it,” the attorney general said of the waiver, which allowed him to participate in a case that involves a senior partner from his former law firm representing Goldman Sachs in the investigation.

The New York Times, the media, the internet and the impatient public

Barr also took some swings at modern technology and the press, as well as the pressures created by the public fascination with Mueller’s investigation.

The attorney general said the world wide web had magnified the threat posed by Russians looking to make mischief in the U.S. political system. “I think the internet creates a lot more opportunities to have that kind of covert effect on the American body politic, so, it’s getting more and more dangerous,” Barr said.

The attorney general also suggested that it was urgent for him to release the bottom-line findings of Mueller’s report without further details because Americans were too spun up about the investigation and simply could not wait.

To wait even briefly to release the executive summaries Mueller wanted to put out would have been like holding back the floodwaters.

“When the report came in on [March] 22nd and we saw it would take a great deal of time to get it out to the public, I made the determination that we had to put out some information about the bottom line,” Barr said. “There was massive interest in learning what the bottom-line results of Bob Mueller’s investigation was, particularly as to collusion.”

Another Barr target Wednesday was The New York Times. Answering a question about Trump’s alleged attempt to get White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Mueller, Barr argued that The Times got it wrong. He said that while McGahn and Trump disagreed about what Trump had asked for, there was no indication that he explicitly told McGahn to have Mueller fired.

“The New York Times’ story said flat out that the president directed the firing of Mueller — told McGahn: fire Mueller,” Barr said. “Now, there’s something very different between firing a special counsel outright, which suggests ending the investigation, and having a special counsel removed for conflict, which suggests that you’re going to have another special counsel. … There is a distinction between saying, ‘Fire Muller. Go fire him,’ and have him removed based on conflict.”

While the Times article did say flatly that Trump had ordered Mueller’s firing, it also described the various conflicts that Trump was alleging should disqualify Mueller.

As the 2020 Democratic presidential field began to form earlier this year, Trump campaign officials received a directive from the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner: Don’t meddle in primary politics.

Targeting specific Democratic presidential hopefuls was at best a waste of time—and could even be counterproductive, Kushner warned.

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“Basically what he has advised the campaign is, now is not the moment for them to be making news or attacking anyone,” said the person familiar with Kushner’s strategy.

But that rule doesn’t seem to apply to the candidate himself.

Over the past several weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly mocked and insulted his individual Democratic challengers. Most recently, as Joe Biden has become an instant Democratic front-runner, Trump has repeatedly attacked the former vice president.

Trump went on a spree early Wednesday morning, when he retweeted nearly 60 tweets from people expressing anger over the International Association of Firefighters’ Monday endorsement of Biden. Trump had also rage-tweeted at his rival on Twitter the previous two days, calling him “sleepy” and “not very bright.” A few days earlier he told the Fox News host Sean Hannity that Biden is “not going to be able to do the job.”

The two approaches reflect divided opinion among Trump’s aides, advisers and Republican supporters. One school of thought holds that an early front-runner like Biden—who some Trump advisers fear is the strongest Democratic in the field given his moderate credentials—must be attacked early and often. Another argues that engaging Biden gives the Democrat exactly what he wants in a 20-candidate primary field: the image that he is already waging a head-to-head battle with a rattled incumbent.

“We’ve asked him — I’ve personally asked him — to stop. It’s not helping us. It’s helping Biden,” said one Trump adviser. “We don’t think Biden can make it out of the woke Democrat primary. But he will if the president gives him oxygen.”

But other Trumpworld veterans see an opposite rationale. “The national press corps is covering every single thing Joe Biden does right now. So if Biden is going to be on the front page of every paper, leading every single newscast, why not weigh in and help frame the debate?” said Jason Miller, who served on Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Either way, Biden appears to be enjoying it. “I understand the President has been tweeting a lot about me this morning,” he told an Iowa crowd on Wednesday.

“I wonder why the hell he’s doing that,” Biden added with a chuckle.

It is not clear whether Kushner’s advice was specifically motivated by concern about building up an individual Democrat, or whether he simply believes Trump’s campaign should be focused inward for now. In what one person familiar with his strategy called Kushner’s “low drama, high confidence” approach, Trump’s son-in-law believes the Trump campaign should focus on building out the campaign’s infrastructure, raising money and developing an unparalleled data operation.

One close Trump adviser, his longtime friend and conservative media executive Chris Ruddy, described the president’s Biden fixation as a mere phase. Trump, he claimed, doesn’t actually feel threatened by the former vice president, even though Ruddy and others believe that Biden, who held his first campaign event in his native state of Pennsylvania, is better positioned than most Democratic hopefuls to flip Trump-won battleground states in 2020.

“The general view is the election is going to go down to three or four states, maybe five, and these states include Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, [and] Florida. And these are states that Joe Biden would be on paper a good fit,” Ruddy told POLITICO.

Trump campaign officials meanwhile wave off the idea that Trump is betraying defensiveness about Biden’s prospects. They argue that Biden won’t stand a chance in the general election because of how they predict the Democratic primary will unfold.

“Whoever emerges from this will be beat up, broke, and will not have a national operation to flip a switch on,” said Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the Trump campaign.

“So to us,” Murtaugh continued, “we take opportunities to engage on the Democratic side when they present themselves, but a day-to-day shooting at candidates is right now not something the campaign is doing.”

Instead, that work has been outsourced to the Republican National Committee, which issues a near-daily barrage of attacks on the Democratic candidates’ public statements and proposals. Officials based in the Trump campaign’s Arlington, Va. headquarters have focused on identifying and eliminating their electoral vulnerabilities and shaping local party operations to be unapologetically pro-Trump.

“I think the RNC is a natural place to be defining individual candidates and going after whatever policies they’re pursuing. The campaign has been great at engaging and has been focused more on a broad-brush approach,” said an RNC official.

But even Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, couldn’t resist getting in on the bash-Biden act, going after Biden’s trade policies during a Monday night appearance on Fox News.

Biden has bugged the president ever since his Thursday announcement video criticizing Trump over his response to the summer 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. It was calibrated to hit Trump at what a second Trump adviser called the president’s “low point.” Trump responded by defending his controversial remarks about Charlottesville as “perfect,” before turning his attention to Biden’s firefighters endorsement this week. (It was not immediately clear whether all of the many dozens of accounts Trump retweeted were legitimate.)

Meanwhile, Biden has shot back each time.

One White House official speculated that Biden’s comments about the president’s Wednesday tweeting would prompt another tweetstorm Thursday morning, adding that the ongoing back-and-forth between Trump and Biden already feels like a general election contest.

“He believes his tweets have power, but Biden just irritates him. I imagine at the end of the day he’ll move on to someone else. We hope he does,” said the second Trump adviser.

“I’m sure smart guys like Brad [Parscale] are telling him to stop this and he’s telling them to go fuck themselves,” the adviser added. “Still, we wish he’d stop.”

Biden pollster John Anzalone said Trump is worried because he knows Biden fishes from the same pool of voters who helped push Trump over the top in the Rust Belt and swing state Florida.

“Trump is nervous and he should be,” Anzalone said. “Biden is relatable to the working-class voters Trump appealed to based on fear. They were willing to take a risk on him. But Biden appeals to them based on relatability. They know him and trust him. That’s the difference… Biden uses decency and respect to reach these voters. Trump uses dynamite.”

Daniel Lippman contributed to this story.

IOWA CITY, Iowa — Joe Biden has a healthcare plan, but doesn’t “have the time to completely lay out all the details.”

He also has a proposal for college debt, but no specifics on that either because “I don’t have time; I don’t want to keep you standing any longer.”

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The former vice president’s ideas on climate change and foreign policy? Also works in progress.

Yet there’s time for relatively lengthy anecdotes about how his dad long ago was unable to secure a loan to help send him to a school he wanted to attend. And time to describe a New Yorker cartoon that hung in his office, to praise President Obama, to remember the untimely death of his beloved son Beau and — a crowd favorite — to bash President Trump.

In his first campaign tour of Iowa since announcing his bid for president, Biden has been light on policy detail and heavy on emotion. There are clear signs of rust: he mangles phrases and flubs names. He needed a teleprompter at his Pittsburgh debut and relies on notecards for names and important subjects.

But judging by the polls and the adoring crowds who saw him during the first four stops of his just-announced candidacy, that’s just fine. He’s under no immediate pressure to offer more specifics or smooth out the rough spots.

In Dubuque on Tuesday, the second of his first two Iowa stops, Biden nailed the end of his speech, which he built to a crescendo by throwing shade at Trump and appealing to American optimism.

“We choose hope over fear! We choose unity over division! We choose truth over lies! And we choose science over fiction!” Biden said to loud applause. “Remember who we are!” Biden said. “This is the United States of America!”

Biden is also polishing his technique as he goes. Though his off-the-cuff humor usually produces laughs from the crowd, Biden occasionally misses the mark — as he did when he tried several times to tell a joke rooted in a New Yorker cartoon mocking “job creators” as bank robbers. By the time he described what the cartoon looked like and got to the punchline, few knew what he was talking about judging by the nervous and confused chuckles from the crowd.

By his third Iowa stop, at an Iowa City brewery and taproom, Biden got the message that the joke didn’t work and stopped using it.

After the speeches, Biden is in his element as Uncle Joe, expertly shooting selfie after selfie with voters’ smartphones, high-fiving small children and giving words of encouragement to well-wishers thrilled just to be standing next to a former vice president.

Each of the venues — a veterans memorial hall in Cedar Rapids, the Dubuque convention center, an Iowa City taproom, an old Des Moines nightclub — hosted a few hundred people. The crowds weren’t as large — or as electric — as at Trump’s events at this stage of the 2016 election cycle, but the attendees say it’s simply a reflection of familiar but low-key style.

“Biden doesn’t go to the base insanity like Trump. We need sanity again,” John Roethig, a 66-year-old Dubuque Democrat.

For Roethig and other Biden Democrats, the lack of policy specifics doesn’t matter. There’s an understanding among them that Congress will only pass so much of a president’s agenda, and all the major Democrats are generally in line on the big picture ideas that matter anyway — more affordable healthcare, college affordability, a need for more renewable fuels.

There is one issue that differentiates Biden from his Democratic rivals, according to his supporters: electability. Biden Democrats say he’s the biggest threat to Trump, if not the biggest irritant, after Trump spent the days since Biden’s announcement rage-tweeting the former vice president. They say Biden, with the early backing of the International Association of Firefighters and his blue-collar paeans to the “dignity of work” is uniquely suited to win back the white working class voters Trump was able to peel off in the Rust Belt to secure his win.

“This is about beating Trump,” Roethig said.

Biden isn’t completely devoid of policy proposals in the early stage of his campaign. He wants to eliminate the Trump tax cuts and tax loopholes that, he says, favors investors over wager-workers. Biden endorsed a $15 federal minimum wage. And he tried to split the difference among progressives who want Medicare for All vs. a government-run public option that was left out of the Affordable Care Act.

“Whether or not your healthcare is covered through your employer, whether it’s covered on your own or not at all,” Biden said, “everyone should have a choice to buy into a public-option healthcare plan like Medicare.”

Biden also uses healthcare as a means to talk about “my buddy,” President Obama, whose popularity among Democrats has buoyed the former vice president. While he has always been proud to have served as Obama’s vice president, Biden says the passage of the Affordable Care Act was one of the administration’s high points.

“I told President Obama it was a big deal or something to that effect,” Biden, referring to his infamous hot-mic moment when he was caught whispering that it was a “big [expletive] deal,” says to laughs. “Thank God my mom wasn’t around.”

The biggest applause lines often come at Trump’s expense, though.

Democrats loved Biden’s call to fight the “Trump-DeVos education agenda.” And they nodded in agreement when he described the president as an historic aberration.

After launching his campaign last week with a direct shot at Trump by recalling the president’s response to the violent 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Biden at his subsequent speeches accused Trump of dog-whistling white supremacists in such a way that it recalled Alabama’s segregationist Gov. “George Wallace in the 1960s.”

“The anti-Semitic chants about Jews in America could be heard around the world — around the world. Hatred is on the march. And he knew it,” Biden said of Trump’s response to the protests.

Biden says Trump’s response to Charlottesville was crucial in inspiring him to run. He tells crowds that the American system was only able to absorb the shock of the Trump presidency for four years.

“This is not who we are. This is not who the vast majority of the American people are,” Biden says. “That’s why above all else, we have to put an end, electorally, to this administration.”

Beyond that, the specifics were still to come.

“I have an ambitious plan to rebuild this country — from cleaner renewable energy, cleaner safer transportation, a whole range of things — that I’m going to be laying out,” Biden said. “But you’re going to be laying out on the floor if I keep going, if I laid it all out.”