Matt Lauer may have gotten to the heart of What Happened better than any other analyst in an interview with Hillary Clinton on NBC’s Today show this morning. “Did you view it as a historic document,” Lauer asks, “or did you view it as kind of a literary version of a cleanse?”

That’s … a pretty good description, especially in light of Hillary’s answer:

“In addition to the mistakes I made… what about the endemic sexism and misogyny?”- @HillaryClinton on @TODAYshow https://t.co/Yf529ZCSfc

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 13, 2017

Amusingly, Clinton claims to have been “as candid as I could be with myself.” The memoir is the biggest effort of avoidance of that candor possible, put into commercial form. Tellingly, she claims that James Comey’s announcement was the determining factor in the election — not her use of a private e-mail server in a corrupt effort to hide official communications from Congress and the courts.

She then goes on to claim that all Comey had to do was “call me up” to ask if he could see whether she’d been hiding anything. Never mind the fact that Hillary had been hiding the e-mail system itself for six years until the Benghazi select committee discovered it, or that her attorneys deleted more than half of the e-mails from the records before turning the data files over to the FBI — or that it took months and a subpoena before they got access to the systems themselves. Hillary claims that if Comey had asked her for access to anything else, her response would have been, “Absolutely! Have at it!”

Yeah, riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. It’s a cleanse, in the near-literal and literary senses of the word.

Here’s the full interview. Note that in this entire 18-minute discussion, Hillary never once discusses any of the mistakes she made, not even in the one instance that Lauer softballs an opportunity to do so. It’s the 2017 version of the Rose Mary Woods tape. Lauer also whiffs on pressing Hillary on her accusation that he “ambushed” her in a presidential forum last September, bringing it up only to change the subject. Come on, man.