LAWRENCE O'DONNELL: And just for the record, for the audience, her offense against Donald Trump is that she was, in 2016 during the presidential campaign, watching the most incompetent, least informed presidential candidate in history. She watched him with fear like most Americans, and like most Americans, she didn't want him to be president. And she privately communicated that with others, and texts of that private communication eventually became public, including private communication with a former lover of hers at the FBI. They had a right to that private communication, they had a right to the personal view that Donald Trump should not be president, would be a bad president, they were completely right about that...

MOLLY JONG-FAST, THE DAILY BEAST: Well, the only possible law that they could have broken would be the Hatch Act, and they didn't break the Hatch Act. But ironically Kellyanne Conway breaks the Hatch Act all the time.

O'DONNELL: Every day, yeah.

JONG FAST: So they're always like obsessed with saying that people are doing the things that they're actually doing.

O'DONNELL: And Hatch Act is publicly advocating for a client, which government workers can't do, which she did not do. Then the issue becomes was her judgment in any of the elements involving the investigation of the Russian interference in our election -- was any of her judgment colored by the fact that she didn't want Donald Trump to be president. And we have found absolutely no evidence of that.

JONG-FAST: She's been totally exonerated. I mean it's such -- and we know that this December 8th IG Report is going to exonerate her further because we've seen that in the leaks. The question is really, like, why were these text messages leaked, and how does the president use women to distract? You know, how does he get his base all ginned up with misogyny to distract from the things he's doing that are sort of nefarious. And we see it again and again and again, you know.

O'DONNELL: It almost seems like he would have to invent a Lisa Page if you didn't have one.

JONG-FAST: Or a Christine Blasey Ford or a Marie Yovanovich. It's just this continual women that he finds to use, to abuse.

O'DONNELL: And you see and your reporting indicates that for Donald Trump, there's extra fuel in this when it's a woman he's attacking.

JONG-FAST: Yeah. I think there's this weird sexual angle, like "the lover, Lisa Page. But, yeah, he gets much more involved in the narrative when it's a woman, and you see -- it just -- I'm always shocked. Like we saw it with E. Jean Carroll. I wrote about her. It was that same thing where he just went after her. I mean this is my favorite Trump thing he does. "I mean no disrespect." Right?

O'DONNELL: Yes, he uses that phrase.

JONG-FAST: And then he's horrendously disrespectful. You know, that doesn't negate the disrespect.