President Donald Trump is increasingly at odds with Attorney General William Barr over the status of the Justice Department's investigation into the origin of the Russia probe, with the president increasingly critical about a lack of arrests and Barr frustrated by Trump's public pronouncements about the case, according to people familiar with the matter.
Trump and his allies had high hopes for the investigation led by Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, betting it would expose what they see as wrongdoing when the FBI opened a case into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with Russia to sway the 2016 election.
Trump has also pushed to tie prominent Obama administration officials to that effort as part of his campaign against Joe Biden, who was serving as vice president at the time.
But a year and a half into the investigation, and with less than one month until Election Day, there has been only one criminal case: a former FBI lawyer who pleaded guilty to altering a government email about a former Trump campaign adviser who was a target of secret FBI surveillance.
With time running out for pre-election action on the case, Trump is increasingly airing his dissatisfaction in tweets and television appearances. Barr, meanwhile, has privately expressed frustration over the public comments, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
It's not dissimilar to a situation earlier this year, when Trump complained publicly that he believed ally Roger Stone was getting a raw deal in his prosecution, even as Barr had already moved to amend a sentencing position of the prosecutors in the case.
Despite Trump's unhappiness, there's no indication Barr's job is at risk in the final weeks of the campaign.
Still, the tensions between Trump and the attorney general over the fate of the probe underscore the extent to which the president is aggressively trying to use all of the levers of his power to gain ground in an election that has been moving away from him.