Give-us-what-we-want-when-we-want-it attitudes are often found on a toddler’s playground but don’t belong in hearing rooms of the U.S. Capitol and in discussions about one of the nation’s top utilities.
But that’s what was on display this week as Attorney General William Barr testified before the U.S. House Appropriations, Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Subcommittee, and as Bill Johnson ended his tenure as chief executive officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The attorney general was called to the committee to discuss his department’s needs in the fiscal 2020 budget, but that’s not what House Democrats wanted to talk about. No, indeed. They wanted to know why the man before them hadn’t give each of them copies of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
They didn’t care about whether Russia interfered with the election, though. That already had been established. What they wanted to see was what possible damaging evidence might be contained in the report on President Donald Trump. They wanted that because Barr had quickly summed up the report’s conclusions a couple of weeks ago that were just the opposite of what they hoped to see.
Mueller, according to a summary Barr released about special counsel’s report, concluded there was no evidence of collusion between the president and Russia regarding the election, and that he could not make a case that there was any obstruction of justice by the president.