You are sitting here defending an assault on American democracy. Somebody probably said nice things about anybody at a given point. This is an unprecedented event that was done at the behest of the House Republicans that was leaked to the press by the House Republicans.

What's the real difference between Republicans and Democrats? Let me tell ya the real difference ... Republicans will always take on people in the interest of power and good democrats will never fear to take on the power in the interests of people.

There is nothing going on and in the meantime we do know that our democracy is under assault by the KGB. To me, that's something we ought to be talking about. That's a relevant issue in this campaign [2016].

We ought to be talking about our democracy being under assault right now and what we're going to do about it and not what somebody said in July about James Comey. That's a distraction, that's not what's going on.

Truth is relative. Truth is what you can make the voter believe is the truth. If you're smart enough, truth is what you make the voter think it is. That's why I'm a Democrat. I can make the Democratic voters think whatever I want them to.

If you didn't have some sense of idealism, then what is there to sustain you?

I think the Democratic Party has the chronic problem of appearing to be weak, of not standing and fighting for what it believes in, not fighting for its own.