Democrat Adam Schiff tells Stephen Colbert his House Intelligence Committee will follow Trump's money

Stephen Colbert had incoming House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Tuesday's Late Show, and he wasted little time with niceties. "Is there something you know that you can't tell me, that would just blow my brains out?" he asked. "Yes," Schiff said, but he appeared to be joking. Still, in the public domain, "when you think about what we've seen in the last few weeks, it's really quite shocking," he added. He started with ex-Trump fixer Michael Cohen's revelations about Trump's business negotiating with Russia for a Moscow building well into the 2016 campaign.

The presumptive GOP nominee for president was "misleading the country and privately seeking the Kremlin's help to make a deal — and what we've seen subsequently is that not only was he hiding this from the country, the Kremlin was helping in the cover-up," Schiff said. "Wait, are you saying the Russians lied to us?" Colbert asked in mock outrage. Schiff laughed, briefly. "We expect the Russians to lie," he said. "We expect a president of the United States to be telling the truth, and therein lies the problem."

"For two years, we've had this deeply unethical man running the country, and for two years, the Republican Congress has done nothing to oversee any of the allegations of malfeasance — and that stops now," Schiff said. "One of the most basic rules of doing investigation is you follow the money. We were not allowed to follow the money," but it's now incumbent to find out what leverage Russia and Saudi Arabia have over the president. "Is foreign funding influencing U.S. policy in a way that's not in our national interest?" Schiff asked. "I think it would be negligent for us not to find out."

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Colbert and Schiff discussed other areas of inquiry, and Colbert ended with a final observation: "I've interviewed you several times before. I've never seen you look this happy." Watch below. Peter Weber