WASHINGTON (NYTIMES) - Attorney-General William Barr is considering stepping down before President Donald Trump's term ends next month, according to three people familiar with this thinking. One said Mr Barr could announce his departure before the end of the year.

It was not clear whether the attorney-general's deliberations were influenced by Mr Trump's refusal to concede his election loss or his fury over Mr Barr's acknowledgment last week that the Justice Department uncovered no widespread voting fraud. In the ensuing days, the president refused to say whether he still had confidence in his attorney-general.

One of the people insisted that Mr Barr had been weighing his departure since before last week and that Mr Trump had not affected the attorney-general's thinking. Another said Mr Barr had concluded that he had completed the work that he set out to accomplish at the Justice Department.

But the president's public complaints about the election, including a baseless allegation earlier last week that federal law enforcement had rigged the election against him, are certain to cast a cloud over any early departure by Mr Barr. By leaving early, Mr Barr could avoid a confrontation with the president over his refusal to advance Mr Trump's efforts to rewrite the election results.

Mr Barr's departure would also deprive the president of a Cabinet officer who has wielded the power of the Justice Department more deeply in service of a president's political agenda than any attorney-general in a half-century. Conversely, it would please some Mr Trump allies, who have called for Mr Barr to step down over his refusal to wade further into Mr Trump's efforts to overturn the election outcome.

Mr Barr has not made a final decision, and the prospect of him staying on through Jan 20 remains a possibility, the people familiar with his thinking cautioned. Should Mr Barr step down before the end of the Trump administration, the deputy attorney-general, Mr Jeffrey Rosen, would be expected to lead the Justice Department until President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House had no comment.

Mr Barr, 70, is the strongest proponent of presidential power to hold the office of attorney-general since Watergate. Soon after he was confirmed in February 2019, he gained Mr Trump's trust and his ear.

He managed to heal fissures between the White House and the Justice Department that broke open when the president learned that his campaign was under investigation related to Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

Like Mr Trump, Mr Barr believed that the FBI had abused its power in investigating the Trump campaign's ties to Russia. An independent inspector-general has found that the bureau had sufficient reason to open the inquiry and that senior officials there acted without political bias in doing so.

But weeks after taking office, Mr Barr released a summary of the report by the special counsel, Robert Mueller III, that a judge later called distorted and misleading. He presented it in the best possible light for Mr Trump before the public could read it.

Mr Barr soon asked Mr John Durham, the US attorney in Connecticut, to open an investigation into the Russia inquiry itself to seek out any wrongdoing under the Obama administration.

While that investigation has not yet produced the kind of results that Mr Trump has explicitly said he would like to see - including criminal charges against former President Barack Obama and Mr Biden, as well as the former FBI director James Comey - Mr Barr has ensured that Mr Durham's work will continue into the next administration.

In October, he secretly appointed Mr Durham a special counsel assigned to seek out any wrongdoing in the course of the Russia investigation.

Mr Barr revealed that appointment last week at the same time that he said he had not seen evidence that voter fraud had affected the results of the election. Pairing the Durham announcement with that revelation was widely seen as an effort to placate Mr Trump, who was said to be enraged that Mr Barr had publicly contradicted him.

Throughout the presidential campaign, Mr Barr was among the loudest voices warning that mail-in ballots would result in mass election fraud. He routinely claimed in speeches and interviews that the potential for widespread voter fraud was high and posed a grave danger. Mr Barr's claims were sometimes false or exaggerated and were widely refuted.

"I don't have empirical evidence other than the fact that we've always had voting fraud. And there always will be people who attempt to do that," Mr Barr said in September. He called his conclusions "common sense."

And after the election, Mr Barr opened the door to politically charged election fraud investigations, authorising federal prosecutors to investigate "specific allegations" of voter fraud before results were certified. Typically, the Justice Department waits until after vote totals are certified to investigate such suspicions in order to avoid shaking public confidence in elections.

At the same time, Mr Barr's public appearances dwindled, and he did not comment on the results or Mr Trump's attempts to overturn the outcome. But as the president's legal challenges hit a dead end, the pressure on Mr Barr to speak out increased when Mr Trump suggested in an interview on Nov 29 that the Justice Department and the FBI might have been "involved" in some sort of election fraud.

"This is total fraud. And how the FBI and Department of Justice - I don't know, maybe they're involved - but how people are allowed to get away with this stuff is unbelievable," Mr Trump told the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

Mr Barr broke his silence a few days later, telling The Associated Press that he had not seen evidence of election fraud on a scale that would have changed the fact that Mr Biden won.