last question for you. you have known robert mueller for a long time. you knew james comey for a very long time. you know a lot of the people who have become prime movers and central characters in the russia investigation going forward. do you have confidence that the russia investigation will end conclusively with us knowing what happened and with some sort of justice being done? well, i have confidence that there will be a conclusive investigation done by bob mueller. the question ultimately becomes what does he do with the investigation that he completes. does he bring indictments? does he do a report like ken starr did and send it to the house? i m not sure what happens there and how much of what he does will be able to be shared. he ll be using a grand jury. and there are rules that prevent the sharing of what happens in front of a grand jury to a general public though you can get a court to say that s okay. my hope would be that he would do a thorough investigation, decide on w
representative of the obama administration. and for some, i m not saying all, there were probably some racial issues. in terms of the justice department as a national security agency, which in many ways it is, i ve always wondered if it fit it is line of national security policy making. in the sense that it s less partisan than other types of domestic policy. what i mean, in my job i m often looking back into some time in the last couple of generations looking for historical context for things that are happening now. and officials that i m talking to are national security advisors, i have to look up what their party affiliation is, because it s often not that important and there s a certain continuity in national security. is that also true in justice. yes, justice department officials have gotten in trouble
between the justice department and the white house, even though you re a part of the administration. put up kind of an interesting thing between me and the president who i was a friend with. there were certain things we couldn t discuss. certain things we didn t discuss. but i think that s an appropriate way for an attorney general to think of himself or herself and it s an appropriate way for the justice department to be run. is there more discontinuity between the justice department under jeff sessions and the justice department under president obama than there has been between previous administrations? i m looking from the outside but it sure seems that way to me. there have been statements that this attorney general has made. attorney general sessions has made. the interactions he s had with the white house that are inconsistent with the way in which i conducted myself as attorney general and frankly the way in which my predecessors, many of my predecessors, conducted themselve
we ve got a very big live interview tonight. former attorney general eric holder is here with me in studio tonight. this will be his first live tv interview since the election. eric holder obviously has a role in history as the tenure as the nation s first african-american attorney general. one who made very significant changes and very significant decisions in american law enforcement and justice while he was in the obama cabinet. now that he has been succeeded in office by a man who, let s be honest, is the human antonym of eric holder, eric holder has been outspoken in private life about defending his and president obama s legacy on justice issues. he s also been outspoken about president trump and the trump
keep the appropriate amount of distance. it wasn t difficult with barack obama. he s a lot of things and among them he s a good lawyer who understands the value of having an independent justice department. there were things that i would want to share with him because i knew he was going to be reading about them in the newspapers the next day, monday or something like that. the doma decision, the decision not to defend doma i made. i thought this was one he can t read about in the newspapers. so on the sunday of the super bowl party i told him this is the decision i made. he said to me, i m glad pip didn t know how to approach you. this is where i wanted my justice department to be. but i m glad you made that decision. you presented it to him as a fait accompli and he said i wanted to suggest it to you but i didn t think that s appropriate. exactly. that s the relationship that