A shiver may have gone down every Democrats' spine yesterday when this report was released. That's because for some, certainly those who worked on Hillary Clinton's campaign, it had echoes of 2016. Of course, in that election, one topic dominated the campaigns of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A growing firestorm over her emails. And her private emails.

3,000 more pages of emails from Hillary Clinton's personal account.

Her private email server scandal. She deleted the emails.

The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.

Then, on June fifth, then FBI director, James Comey walked in front of the cameras and said this.

There is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

And this.

There is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.

In the months that followed, eight out of the nine straight Gallup polls found that the one word Americans heard the most about Hillary Clinton then was email. Yet in the resulting media coverage, there was very little mention of this part.

No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

Fast forward to where we are now, as polls do show that 76% of Americans all authorities say President Biden's age is a problem. It's a reality that Republicans are often happy to bring up.

He's too old.

Joe Biden is too old. Everyone's saying he's too old. That's where Special Counsel Her and his report comes into the picture. With this report to Congress that describes the President, and I'm quoting the Special Counsel now, as an elderly man with a poor memory, and that Mr. Biden's memory also appeared to have significantly current limitations, the political reality remains that even the very first line of the report, which states, We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter, does risk being overlooked. Proof of how many, the reminder of Komi, gave some Democrats heart palpitations. Listen to the words of a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton telling the New York Times, The first text I got this morning was, Were you thoroughly triggered last night? It's a moment in time that my next guest knows just as well as about anybody. Here tonight is the former Deputy Director of the FBI who had a front row seating 2016, Andrew McKabe. Thank you so much for being here. I mean, did you have Komi flashbacks as you were reading through her's report yesterday?

Yeah, I did. I mean, there's some nauseating similarities to that situation from July fifth, 2016, and to what we saw in the report yesterday.

Can you just talk through the differences here? Because there is a difference in the sense of what Jim Comey was obligated to do and what Robert Herr here was obligated to do in the sense that he's a special counsel. He had to issue a report here. He did not have an option. Maybe he didn't have to put the mentions of Biden's memory in there, but he did actually have to issue a report here.

Sure. That's exactly right. The regulations that govern the conduct and the appointment of special counsels require that at the end of the investigation, the special counsel must submit a report to the attorney general, and it's got to explain what he found and why he is either pursuing or declining charges. And to be clear, Rob Herr's report checks those boxes in great detail, lays out what he found and, of course, why he's not pursuing charges. The difference with the situation with Jim Comey, Jim was not a special counsel. He was not under any obligation, certainly not under an obligation to make a public statement about what we thought of the investigation we had conducted into the emails. Jim felt that it was important and necessary for the public to understand, for us to be transparent about what we found and what we thought about the case, because the case had been so public since its inception. The public knew about the investigation before we ever got it from the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community. There was so much anticipation that Jim felt that there was no one in a better position than us. We had done the investigation.

We should go out and tell the public what our conclusion was. And I think that was... Those are questionable decisions. I think where we stepped far over the line and made a mistake was in Jim's rhetoric, clearly criticizing Hillary Clinton, but of course not recommending that she be charged. The use of those terms was very likely a violation of DOJ policy that says You don't say bad things about someone who you're not going to charge.

So you think what Komi did that day, you think he was wrong?

I do. I do. And that's not an easy thing for me to conclude because I was a very close I worked very closely with Jim. I was on that team. I reviewed his remarks before he made them. But in retrospect, I think I should have worked harder to convince him not to use those terms and possibly not to make the statement at all. Nevertheless, it is what it is. Jim made the decision to go forward in the way he did. I think that the effect of that statement, I mean, you used to say how great of an effect it had on the election. There's no question it was not positive for Secretary Clinton. Then, of course, the entire thing was accelerated with the decision in November to announce that we had reopened the case, which is a totally separate matter, but had massive consequences, I'm afraid.

When you read in this special counsel's report, those comments, not just the one, there were multiple about Biden's memory. Did it stand out to you as going against or around what the protocol would be for a report like this?

Yeah, Kaitlyn, it really does. I mean, it really felt like it was another instance of a very high-profile investigator who was coming out with a conclusion that he likely knew would not be accepted or embraced by many people and attempting to even out the scales. In other words, to play to the segment of the audience that was going to be frustrated by the fact that he concluded not to pursue charges. That's what it felt like to me. That's my opinion. I have a lot of concerns with some of the things, the way that he talked about the evidence in the report, the way that the the headline from the report isn't supported when you get down into the meat of the analysis of things like the sufficiency of the evidence. I have all kinds of questions why, in several places, he says that President Biden willfully retained national defense information and then goes on to say after Page 200 that there is insufficient evidence to support that conclusion, and that's why he wasn't pursuing charges. There's a lot of inconsistencies in the report that I think are ultimately damaging to the subject.

Yeah. He said at one point that if you were trying to really keep documents, you wouldn't necessarily put them in a box in your garage next to all kinds of trash or things you're throwing out. Andrew McCabe, obviously, you're the perfect voice on this. Thank you so much for joining tonight.

Thanks, Kaitlyn.