Taking to Twitter Tuesday morning, NBC’s Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd lost it over anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok being fired and President Trump praising the dismissal. Ranting that the president’s criticism of Strzok was “extraordinary and un-democratic,” Todd feared that other “civil servants” would be intimidated by the supposed effort to “character assassinate.”

Completely ignoring Strzok’s text messages promising to “stop” Trump’s election in 2016, Todd bemoaned: “I don’t know if folks realize how extraordinary and un-democratic (small d) it is for the president of the United States to run down a civil servant like this...” He then tried to build a criminal case against the president: “Q for legal folks: when does this become an intimidation tactic to the point of legal obstruction?”

In a second tweet moments later, Todd fretted: “I wonder if other civil servants who believe they have seen wrongdoing are watching how POTUS and his echo chamber can character assassinate so viciously and get second thoughts about doing their job given the risk POTUS is showcasing to anyone who crosses him?”

Despite the obvious legitimate reasons for Strzok to be fired, namely him sending numerous anti-Trump texts on a government phone to another FBI official he was having an affair with while he was heading investigations into both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Todd mourned the loss.

Appearing on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports on Tuesday, legal analyst and former senior FBI official Chuck Rosenberg told Mitchell that the firing was completely justified and defended decision made by Deputy FBI Director David Bowdich to do so:

Dave Bowdich is the senior most career FBI official in the entire agency. He’s not a political appointment, he’s a career guy who came up through the ranks. Second, as much as I like Peter Strzok, he exhibited remarkably bad judgement. And so, when you go through the factors of whether or not someone’s demoted or suspended or fired, one of those factors is whether you bring disrepute to the agency, whether you bring shame to the FBI. And he did. And so, it’s not a crazy decision. In fact, I understand why Dave Bowdich did it.

Still, Mitchell wrung her hands over Strzok’s dismissal: “Given all the political pressure to get rid of him, he’s become a poster child for the president for everything that he hates about the alleged, so-called ‘witch hunt.’ So – and given his experience of decades of service as the leading counterintelligence expert at a time when America is again under attack from Russia in the upcoming midterms, what’s the balance here?”

While Rosenberg said that it “pains” him to see “a good man and a good agent” like Strzok go, he explained: “Dave Bowdich had to make a decision, in the end, about what’s best for the FBI, not what’s best for Pete Strzok....it wasn’t made for political reasons. It was made because Bowdich thought this was in the best interests of the FBI.”

While Rosenberg rightly chastised Strzok’s “remarkably bad judgement,” when House Republicans grilled the FBI agent during a congressional hearing on July 12, MSNBC lined up a panel of liberal pundits to accuse the GOP of McCarthyism and praise Strzok’s “integrity.”

Here is a transcript of the August 14 exchange between Mitchell and Rosenberg: