WASHINGTON — Attorney General William Barr has told people close to President Trump – inside and outside the White House – that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department.

So far, Trump has defied Barr’s requests, both public and private, to keep quiet on matters of federal law enforcement. It was not immediately clear Tuesday whether Barr had made his posture known directly to Trump. The administration officials said Barr seemed to be sharing his position with advisers in hopes that the president would get the message that he should stop weighing in publicly on the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal investigations.

“He has his limits,” said one person familiar with Barr’s thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity, like others, to discuss internal deliberations.

Late last week, Barr publicly warned the president in a remarkable interview with ABC News that his tweets about Justice Department cases “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Trump, White House officials said, is not entirely receptive to calls to change his behavior, and he has told those around him he is not going to stop tweeting about the Justice Department. They said Trump sees highlighting FBI and Justice Department misconduct as a good political message.

The standoff between Trump and Barr intensified Tuesday, when Trump declared in a string of early morning tweets that he might sue those involved in the special counsel’s investigation into his 2016 campaign and suggested that Roger Stone, his friend convicted of lying to Congress in that probe, deserved a new trial.

Hours later, a Justice Department official revealed that prosecutors had filed a sealed motion in court arguing the opposite, and that they had Barr’s personal approval to do so.

Barr had a previously scheduled lunch with the White House counsel Tuesday and was still the attorney general by day’s end – indicating that the president’s moves that day were not enough to push him to resign. But he and his Justice Department seemed to remain mired in a political crisis, with an uncertain future.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. White House representatives did not respond to questions for this report. Some people familiar with Barr’s thinking cautioned that he would not make a hasty decision to leave, and it is unclear what precisely would trigger him to take such a dramatic step.