Paul Callan is a CNN legal analyst, a former New York homicide prosecutor and of counsel to the New York law firm of Edelman & Edelman PC, focusing on wrongful conviction and civil rights cases. Follow him on Twitter @paulcallan. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN) "Snitty" fairly describes the tone of Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats during their Wednesday interrogation of Attorney General William Barr over the Mueller report. "General Barr," as some of his questioners called him, did indeed betray his upper-crust roots when he commented that the letter of complaint special counsel Robert Mueller sent him on March 27 was "a bit snitty." Snitty is the sort of mannered usage not often tossed off in the halls of Congress these days, and as a result, the AG came in for some ridicule in the press and among late-night comedians.

Paul Callan

Given the desire of many Democratic Senators to parade their "woke" credentials, they might have preferred Barr use "hurtful" and "insensitive" to describe the letter he said was likely drafted by "one of (Mueller's) staff people."

(Even Merriam-Webster's Twitter team swiftly jumped into the fray : "to be 'snitty' is to be disagreeably ill-tempered. Got it?")

Yes, Barr does get it and felt no need to express it with political correctness. In fact, he was unflappable, holding his own during five contentious hours of grilling. Some of the insulting language hurled at him by the Senate Democrats in opposition to all things Trump might have amounted to actionable slander if used outside of the immunity-draped halls of Congress.

A particularly brutal example was the almost incomprehensible verbal assault directed at Barr by Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii. "Mr. Barr, now the American people know that you are no different from Rudy Giuliani or Kellyanne Conway or any of the other people who sacrificed their once decent reputation for the grifter and liar who sits in the Oval Office," she said.

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