Stephen Colbert looks over the latest Trump-Russia news, suggests 'Mueller Claus is coming to town!'

"I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving while we were off," Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday's Late Show. "Of course, now we kick off a very special season — we're all waiting for that magical man to check his naughty-and-nice list, because Mueller Claus is coming to town!" He sang that last part, and continued in song for a bit. "It appears the Russia investigation is heading into high gear," he said, starting his recap with Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman whose plea deal with Special Counsel Mueller was axed Monday because Manafort allegedly kept lying to investigators.

So Manfort is now in much deeper trouble. "This can mean only one of two things: One, he's afraid to rat on the Russians 'cause he has a lifelong dream of continuing to live — yes, he's got this bucket list of not ending up in a series of buckets," Colbert joked, darkly. Or "he's expecting Trump to pardon him." Trump hasn't already pardoned him because "while Manafort was pretending to cooperate with Robert Mueller's investigation, this whole time he was also feeding information" to Trump's lawyers, he suggested. "So the fix was in, baby. It was the long con; you do this, you get a pardon; one tiny hand washes another."

"And Manafort really needs that pardon now more than ever," Colbert said, pointing to a report in The Guardian that Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange several times, including in March 2016, right before he joined the Trump campaign. "If this is true, that means the world's palest man met the world's shadiest man," he joked. It would also mean there's a direct link between Trump's campaign and the disseminator of Russian-pilfered Democratic emails. "Okay, that looks bad, but only because it is very bad," Colbert said, ending with equally damning emails about WikiLeaks between Trump adviser Roger Stone and birther Jerome Corsi. Watch below. Peter Weber

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up