During his appearance on Tuesday’s Cuomo Prime Time, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey didn’t shy away from calling Chris Cuomo out for “misleading a lot of people” when it came to the findings of the special counsel investigation. In a brilliant display of schooling the so-called “Facts First” network, Mukasey went toe-to-toe with blowhard host and outclassed him at every turn.

One of Mukasey’s first points was to accurately state that collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia didn’t happen. Despite the facts of the investigation, Conspiracy Cuomo argued that collusion did occur. Then came the first of many reality checks from Mukasey:

CUOMO: Who says it didn’t happen? Russian interference happened. MUKASEY: Russian interference happened for sure, but cooperation and conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians did not happen. And that was -- CUOMO: To a criminal level, no says Mr. Mueller. MUKASEY: -- to any level.

Cuomo likes to remind folks that he used to be a lawyer, but it may become apparent why he no longer practices law when he had to get the U.S. attorney general’s job explained to him more than once (click “expand”):

CUOMO: So, when you say no crime, Mueller couldn’t decide on that one, gave it to your friend the Attorney General, he decided it. MUKASEY: Right, which is his job. CUOMO: It is whose job? MUKASEY: The Attorney General's job. CUOMO: To do what? MUKASEY: It was Mueller's job initially to decide it and he punted. CUOMO: But who says—Well, I said that too, by the way Mike. Maybe I got it from you. I said that. I said Mueller punted. This was his job. He was supposed to make a decision to prosecute or not. But, the finesse position, I’m giving more weigh to now. He knows what his job is. And he sees this as difficult because of the OLC opinion, he can’t indict this President, so he's leaving it to Congress and not the AG. Nowhere in the report does he ask the AG to do it.

Cuomo apparently didn’t know the attorney general of the United States had the authority to decide whether charges should be filed, or he was being supremely disingenuous. “[W]hat your friend did is not just by the book. He took it on himself to decide this rule. He didn't have to do that,” he bitterly declared.

Continuing his crusade against Attorney General William Barr, Cuomo wrongly stated that the special counsel was “separate from the DOJ” and insisted Congress had the power to indict.

Mukasey had to undo the damage Cuomo was doing to his audience and called his host out for misleading people (Click “expand”):

MUKASEY: Of course he had to do it. CUOMO: Why? MUKASEY: Who was going to decide if we were going to indict or not? CUOMO: Congress, as a political matter. Leave it to them. MUKASEY: They decide whether to impeach or not. They don’t decide-- CUOMO: And Mike, you're skipping the big point, which you taught me about very early on. MUKASEY: That is the big point. CUOMO: They can't indict him. That is the opinion from the OLC so there's nothing to decide on that level. It's purely political. It always would be. MUKASEY: Congress doesn't indict. Congress can impeach. CUOMO: I'm using it as just a metaphor here. MUKASEY: But you’re misleading a lot of people.

After Mukasey had to explain all the other ways Special Counsel Robert Mueller could have taken action against the President if he had the goods, Cuomo put on his rhetorical tin foil hat and accused Barr of being part of a cover-up (Click “expand”):

CUOMO: AD Barr didn’t need to do it for that reason. He needed to do it to protect the President. That's why he did it. MUKASEY: Protect the President from what? When he can’t be indicted? CUOMO: From criticism in the open question and giving Congress that kind of momentum. That's why he did it. MUKASEY: Oh, come on. CUOMO: That’s why he did it. That's why he wrote the letter the way he did. That’s why he gave the press conference the way he did. That's why he misled us to what the report would look like the way he did.

“You done,” Mukasey pointedly asked with a long exacerbated whistle. From there, the former AG had to walk Cuomo through how CNN and the rest of the media had the American public whipped up into an “absolute hysteria.”

“[Y]our network were devoting days of people sitting around and talking about a report that they didn't -- whose content they didn't know, that they hadn't seen, in essence, panels of people sitting around a table inhaling their own exhaust and getting high on it,” he exclaimed.

Mukasey also got Cuomo to admit that Barr’s letter wasn’t misleading on the lack of obstruction of justice charges by reminding the former lawyer, that “it is in fact not the job of any counsel or anybody else to exonerate. God does that. Even juries that return acquittals don’t come back and say ‘innocent,’ they say ‘not guilty.’”

As a cherry on top of this embarrassing schooling, Mukasey also talked about how the origins of the Russia investigation needed to be investigated: “This report begins with a misstatement suggesting that the investigation started in July of 2016 when the FBI opened its file. That's the kind of half-truth that's purely designed to irritate anybody who knows the other half.”

The transcript is below, click "expand" to read: