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

Late night tackles Day 5 of the impeachment hearings

(Image credit: Screenshots/YouTube/The Late Show, Late Night, Jimmy Kimmel Live)

published 22 November 2019

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?"

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"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

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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.