Late Night Tackles Trump versus Mueller
Stephen Colbert recaps what we learned about Trump and Russia on the Mueller probe's 1st anniversary
Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation, and The Late Show had a gift idea.
Stephen Colbert said his "happy one-year anniversary of the Mueller investigation" present was this monologue, but "the Senate gave us all something big yesterday," 2,500 pages of testimony about that June 9, 2016, Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., other top Trump campaign officials, and Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.
President Trump and his eldest son have both insisted the president did not know about the now-infamous meeting, Colbert said, "but the transcript of his testimony shows that after Don Jr. set up this meeting, with help from a Russian oligarch's son — as you do when you're not colluding — he immediately made a four-minute mystery call to a blocked number, and earlier testimony revealed that candidate Trump's primary residence has a blocked number." Don Jr. told the Senate he couldn't recall who he'd called. "Sure," Colbert said, "he could have been speaking to anybody between two calls to a Russian oligarch's son planning to collude with the Russian government. 'Hello, Dominos? You'll never guess who has dirt on Hillary Clinton.'"
"Prior to these transcripts coming out, the Trump team had planned to use this anniversary as a turning point in their campaign to end Mueller's probe," Colbert said. The man tasked with that job, Rudy Giuliani, didn't convince Colbert, but Colbert conceded that Giuliani did have a point about Mueller being unable to indict Trump. "The Justice Department has held they can't indict a sitting president since the Nixon administration, and that was reaffirmed in the Clinton administration," he said. "Yes, our two most innocent presidents. 'I am not a crook!' and 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman' has now become 'I am a crook, and I did have sexual relations with that woman, and you can suck it!' I'm paraphrasing." Watch below. Peter Weber