"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."
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