This was self interest, not national interest.

I also think the most useful thing last night, Joe, was his distinction between the legal grounds for the president and the fitness grounds.

I think that's a useful distinction. I thought his weakest thing last night was we learned nothing about, or he did nothing to persuade us that his various interventions in the run-up to the election were justified.

I think to me a guy who was just talking to himself was intellectually unmoored, almost without a compass.

Here he is trying to justify what he did, what he didn't do, and it was who was he acting for? It just seemed to be he took on a disproportionate role in American politics without the mandate to do it.

That's one man's opinion Richard Hauss on MSNBC this morning. I took in a lot of the coverage over the weekend of Komi's book, and I just, I was pretty surprised. The Fox crowd and the non-Fox crowd have a lot of questions about Komi's decisions, his approach in the book.

Everybody criticizes the personal shots of the president, the long tie, the orange skin. That's just surprised. I think Komi has managed to do in his book what he did as an FBI director.

Piss off everyone and make a hell of a lot of money. Matt Zepatoski is the Department of Justice reporter for the Washington Post and joins us. Now Matt, hey, thanks a million. It's good to talk to you. How are you?

Yeah, good. Thanks for having me on. So listen, as long as you cover the Justice Department, and I think all Americans are in favor of justice, what do you think this book and the surrounding personalities, interviews, etc. have done for our view of the Justice Department and the FBI or done to it?

Well, that's a really tough question. I think the main thing that this book drives at is what this has done for James Komi's reputation. And I think in the lead-in, you had a comment around there saying, well, you know what, I was kind of disappointed. And then there were some questions, you know, that I have.

I think Komi's book is re-raising those, you know, I don't I don't think everyone has uniformly found his defenses of what he did, convincing and really comes after the president, no uncertain terms, but he has a lot of tough questions to answer himself. And, you know, I don't think the public is convinced that he answered those in a satisfactory way.

Right. And the fact that this has been pointed out by a lot of people that in the scene, he talked to Stefanopolis for five hours, but in the same one hour portion that we all saw, he talked about how the FBI does not get into politics at all. I've never seen it come up. I've never heard anybody mention it.

And then a little bit later says because Hillary is so far ahead in the polls, I did X. Well, what the hell is that?

I've always been struck by that. And if you remember some months ago, the New York Times and pro public that did sort of big takes on the Clinton email investigation, and there was a lower level FBI official who said the same thing. Well, we assumed Clinton was going to win. So that informed our decision making. And that's just not how it's supposed to work.

I mean, you can't with one on one hand say we were about politics. We're not trying to favor any one person or the other, but oh, by the way, we assumed Clinton was going to win. And that was forming our decision making. That's the definition of politics.

Well, right. And the only way you would assume Hillary was going to win is because you're looking at the polls on a daily basis. I mean, what is that?

It's just not the way it's supposed to work.

Right. Indeed. So Matt, to your mind, are there any?

Well, how do I ask this? Are there any revelations in the book that are of great significance legally that will necessarily be historical?

Legally in terms of the president, I don't think so. I mean, look to me, the book and this interview gives us a lot of things that maybe we didn't have before, like a lot more detail about Jim Comey's interactions with the president and his personal impressions of the president.

But I don't think it really gets to any explosive new as the revelations that are going to affect the course of the Russian investigation.

I mean, you pretty acidiously steer clear of that. You can understand why a lot of this stuff is probably still classified. He offers his impression, but I don't think Bob Mueller or anyone is going to watch Comey's interview and say, aha, that's sort of the smoking gun that is going to propel the case forward. He just adds new detail, I think, to the public's understanding.

...