Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and More Late-Night Hosts Take on Mueller's Report

Late-night hosts had a field day mulling over the details of special counsel Robert Mueller's highly anticipated report on Thursday night. Despite President Donald Trump's many claims Mueller's report "completely exonerated" him from colluding with Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election, there were still plenty of damning details in the report, including instances of Trump's attempts to obstruct justice.

Just about every late night talk show host tackled the 448-page report in lengthy monologues, poking fun at various aspects of the report from the several redactions to the fact that it was delivered to members of Congress on a CD-ROM.

"You know how for a couple of years now you've been thinking, It's probably bad stuff in the Mueller report that makes Donald Trump look terrible? But like three weeks ago…something like three weeks ago Attorney General [William] Bill Barr put out his four-page Valentine to Donald Trump and then you thought, Maybe I'm crazy? Well if you just returned to this dimension from the phantom zone, I want you to know today the Mueller report was released and I'm here to tell ya, you're not crazy," Stephen Colbert said in his opening monologue on the Late Show.

Colbert noted it was obvious Barr hadn't read the report before releasing his summary, because "there's some insane s**t in here."

"Barr knowingly sat up there and said a bald-faced lie," Colbert said. "The president must be so proud."

Meanwhile, on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon couldn't get over the several excluded details included in the report. So he performed the song "(Can't Take No) Redactions"—a politically inspired rendition of the Rolling Stones hit "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction."

Jimmy Kimmel was mostly just happy with the swarms of people in the public who were reading through and commenting on the report. "Say what you will about this president, [but] he has Americans reading again," he joked on Live!

On Late Night With Seth Meyers, the host seemed baffled by the many weeks Trump "spent declaring victory and setting incredibly high expectations for how the report would totally and completely vindicate him of everything," even though the president later confessed he hadn't even read the report, in which Mueller implicated there were grounds for Congress to consider impeachment due to the multiple cases of obstruction listed in the document.

Here’s @SethMeyers taking #ACloserLook at the Mueller Report. https://t.co/2mYcO0EFZ2

— Late Night with Seth Meyers (@LateNightSeth) April 19, 2019

Conan O'Brien couldn't believe the report was actually delivered on a CD. "Yes, I'm not making that up! They delivered the report on a CD-ROM. Do computers even have a CD drive? I haven't heard CD-ROM in a long time," O'Brien said.

He had a solution for elderly folks—like the congressional leaders the report was delivered to—that could help senior citizens get all the information of the Mueller report through the outdated computer platform via a hilarious infomercial for The Mueller Collection, four "easy volumes" of 80 hours worth of "transcripts, testimonies and quotes from all the major featured in the Mueller report."

Uncommon Knowledge

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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.

About the writer


Michigan native, Janice Williams is a graduate of Oakland University where she studied journalism and communication. Upon relocating to New ... Read more

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