On his late-night show Monday night, left-wing late-night host Stephen Colbert made sure to work in several shots at Donald Trump after inviting on his vanquished 2016 foe, Hillary Clinton, and her daughter Chelsea. Among the series of loaded one-liners Colbert aimed at Trump Monday was a reversal of a chant often heard at 2016 Trump rallies and the suggestion to Chelsea that she might want to “slap [Trump’s] mouth.” Hillary — who quite literally was laughing from the second she stepped onto the stage — offered several more appreciative laughs in response to the host’s efforts to bring to life the “alternate timeline” starring President Hillary.
“These are big fans of the alternate timeline we’re not living in,” said Colbert in reference to the wildly cheering audience that greeted the Clintons. The comment prompted one of Clinton’s many forceful laughs.
Colbert initially teased the supposed topic of the evening, Hillary and Chelsea’s latest book, but quickly veered more sharply left to what he was clearly more excited to discuss: Trump Collusion 2.0 — Trump supposedly “pressuring” Ukraine to take down his 2020 political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
“I want to talk about your new book, ‘The Book of Gutsy Women’…” said Colbert, before adding, “and we’re going to do that in just a minute, I promise you.”
That inspired another laugh from trigger-happy Hillary. “Your fault for coming on Ukraine week,” added Colbert. Clinton laughed even harder at the explanation.
“We learned about the Trump-Ukraine call, the private server,” said Colbert. “Is it time to, dare I say, ‘Lock Him Up?'”
Colbert’s sympathetic audience erupted in cheers and applause, eventually taking up the partisan host’s suggested chant: “Lock Him Up! Lock Him Up!”
“What do you make of it?” Colbert asked Clinton, who responded to the chants with an intense fit of laughter.
“So, here we are, and we have started an impeachment inquiry, which will look at the evidence, and I think that’s exactly what should be done,” Clinton said. “I believe strongly that this particular incident has had such a huge impact because we’ve known for a long time that he was a corrupt businessman who cheated people, and we’ve known that he and his campaign asked for aid from Russia. We’ve known that. But to see him in the Office of the President, putting his own personal and political interests ahead of the national security of our country, just pierced through whatever confusion or denial people had. And at that point, Speaker Pelosi rightly said this is something we have to investigate. And that’s what’s going on.”
After more approving applause from his audience, Colbert insisted that he was never a big “impeach him fan,” but “when someone is clearly using the office that they’re in to subvert the ballot box, to use by corrupt means, influence from other countries to maintain their office, what good is the ballot box at that point in time?”
Clinton, whose campaign infamously paid for the still unverified dossier based on foreign sources that helped spark the Robert Mueller-debunked “Trump-Russia collusion” conspiracy theory, responded by arguing that the impeachment process was put in by the founders precisely for an instance such as this.
Neither Colbert nor Clinton addressed the alleged scandal behind Trump’s request of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to “look into” Joe Biden. The then-vice president pressured the Ukrainian government to remove the top prosecutor who had been investigating the Ukrainian-based company that hired Hunter Biden weeks after his father was appointed to head up Ukraine-U.S. relations. Neither did the host and the former First Lady even reference her husband’s famous impeachment. Another topic that didn’t come up during Colbert’s interview was the State Department’s intensified investigation into Hillary’s use of an unauthorized, unsecured server when she was Secretary of State.
Instead, Colbert set Clinton up with some easy hits on the man who ruined her presidential hopes. “How many times when you were secretary of state did you have to say to Obama, ‘You can’t extort foreign countries to get dirt on your political enemies?'” asked Colbert.
After laughing some more, Clinton quipped, “Yeah, that never happened.”
Colbert also tried to include Chelsea in the conversation by painting her mother as a victim of Trump’s “obsession,” and suggesting she might want to “slap his mouth when he says her name.”
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Related: Report: Newly Revealed Documents Blow Up Biden’s Ukraine Story
H/T Grabien