Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers recap 5 days of impeachment hearings, marvel at Fiona Hill

In five days of public impeachment hearings, "the witnesses have been compelling, they've corroborated what the whistleblower said," and "despite what the old brain trust on cable news claims, this is a very simple story," Stephen Colbert said on Thursday's Late Show. He compared the hearings with other "sagas with a lot of characters," specifically Game of Thrones, and he named (some) names and distilled the hearings to a catchy jingle.

"Today's testimony was also easy for you to understand and hard for Trump to swallow," Colbert said, especially from Dr. Fiona Hill, who "came into the hearing with a reputation for not suffering fools lightly" and showed why. "The first butts she booted this morning were Republicans who insist on floating bizarre conspiracy theories about the 2016 election," he said, and she testified that U.S. Ambassador Gordon Sondland was engaged in a "domestic political errand" for Trump in Ukraine. Hill also "confirmed previous reports that nobody likes Rudy Giuliani," recounting that former National Security Adviser John Bolton called him "a hand grenade," Colbert said, skeptically: "Rudy seems more like a Molotov cocktail: used by Russians and full of alcohol."

Hill "laid absolute waste to both the president and all the bootlickers who made the unfortunate decision to do his bidding today — it was ninja-level witness jujitsu," Jimmy Kimmel said on Kimmel Live. "She went in hard on a number of subjects, so much so, Republicans actually stopped asking her questions." Kimmel also recapped what we've learned in the impeachment hearings and said that given the overwhelming evidence, "the question now, going forward, for those congresspeople who support him, is: Are you a Republican or are you an American?"

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

"All the cable news networks have been covering these hearings live," Kimmel's said, "but maybe the most lively moment from all of them came from C-SPAN."

"Impeachment's been so crazy, C-SPAN is turning into Howard Stern," Seth Meyers said at Late Night. He lingered on Thursday's testimony from David Holmes, and he recapped the "jaw-dropping" two weeks of hearings. "In many ways we already knew the core facts at the heart of the case, but this week's testimony has made it clear as day: Yes, there was a quid pro quo; yes, it was ordered by the president; yes, everyone else knew about it; and yes, it was designed specifically to help Trump win the 2020 election." Peter Weber