Seth Meyers suggests a Republican 'accidentally' saved the 'important' but fundamentally 'weird' Mueller hearings

(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Late Night)

published 25 July 2019

President Trump, who said he wouldn't watch former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's highly anticipated House testimony, obviously watched intensely, and his rage-tweeted started before Mueller even sat down, Seth Meyers said on Wednesday's Late Night. "Dear God, his tweets would make more sense if they were scribbled on paper and faxed to a newspaper under the Zodiac symbol," he shuddered. "But at the very least, today's hearings might have been informative both for Trump and for members of Congress who have admitted they didn't read the whole report."

"Today's hearing was so important," Meyer said, after explaining Trump's bizarre "Article II" fantasies, because "a lawless president who openly welcomed foreign interference and then tried repeatedly to stop the investigation of that interference thinks he can do whatever he wants." Then he got to the actual hearing, starting with clips of Mueller explicitly not exonerating Trump.

"The fundamental weirdness of the hearing," Meyers said, is that "Mueller wants the report to speak for itself, and that report is incredibly damning on its own," but "so much of this hearing consisted of Democrats just reading excerpts from the report to Mueller and having Mueller confirm that he did indeed write those excerpts. ... Yeah, he wrote it, that's why this whole thing was so weird. He already wrote down everything he knows. It's like if you called in Ernest Hemingway to grill him about one of his books."

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"Republican, meanwhile, tried to impugn Mueller's credibility" and tended toward bizarre and "unhinged" rants, but it was a Republican, Rep. Ken Buck (Colo.), who "accidentally" got Mueller to say on national television that Trump can be charged with crimes after he leaves office, Meyers said. "You know when Trump heard that, he started pushing the sofa in front of the door. 'You'll never take me alive!' The bottom line from today's hearings is the same as it's always been, we just got to see it played out live on TV: Russia interfered in the election to help Trump, Trump welcomed and encouraged that help, and then he almost certainly committed crimes to obstruct the investigation of that help. Mueller couldn't indict Trump, so the only remedy is impeachment." Watch below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.