Late-night hosts on Thursday discussed FBI agent Peter Strzok’s testimony before Congress and the Nato summit in Brussels, where Donald Trump had contentious talks with allies.
Jimmy Kimmel
“What a day it was on Capitol Hill,” began Jimmy Kimmel. “FBI agent Peter Strzok had his turn in the hot seat. Peter Strzok, for those of you that haven’t been following the president’s tweets, is the guy Republicans are trying to use as proof of some sort of FBI conspiracy against Donald Trump.
“Strzok,” the host explained, “was on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations team, but then Mueller found out that Strzok, in 2016 during the election, had exchanged anti-Trump texts with his girlfriend Lisa Page, who was an FBI lawyer at the time, and he removed him from the investigation.”
At Thursday’s nearly 10-hour meeting, which quickly turned into a partisan melee, Strzok was asked to read his texts with Page aloud. In two texts referring to Trump, he wrote: “OMG, he’s an idiot” and: “How was Trump other than a douche?”
“So Strzok says these personal texts were his personal opinions,” said Kimmel. “But the bozos in the House, and they really are a collection of clowns, when you see them actually speak it is shocking. They desperately want to use this to discredit the whole investigation.”
House Republicans, the host noted, believe Strzok was not only biased against Trump during his time with the FBI investigation but favorable toward Hillary Clinton in the bureau’s investigation of her use of a private email server.
“In particular, this buckethead from Texas, Louie Gohmert, decided to focus on the fact that Strzok was married and having an affair with Lisa Page at the time,” said Kimmel, showing footage of Gohmert’s comments, which quickly sparked a shouting match on the House floor.
Stephen Colbert
Meanwhile, CBS’s Stephen Colbert discussed the Strzok hearing before covering Trump’s ongoing visit to Europe, where he is meeting with Nato allies, Theresa May and, next week in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin.
“We were talking about the complete meltdown of institutional integrity in Washington,” Colbert said of the Strzok hearing. “You know who wasn’t there? Donald Trump.
“Today, he was in England getting to have tea with the Queen,” Colbert said, launching into an impression of the president. “Your Majesty, I was watching The Crown on Netflix and I’ve got to say, you used to be smoking hot.”
“But just this morning he was busy making Nato great again,” the host continued. “For instance, he was in Brussels at a meeting about Russian aggression in Ukraine and Georgia and – surprise surprise – Trump quickly changed the subject to military spending and warned allies that if they didn’t increase their payments, ‘I’ll do my own thing’.”
Trump’s comments were taken as a threat to dismantle the Nato alliance, which led to an emergency meeting among world leaders, where one senior European official described Trump’s comments as “a stream of incoherent sentences”.
“Trump walked away triumphant and immediately called an impromptu press conference where he boasted about what he’s accomplished,” said Colbert, showing footage of Trump claiming to have convinced allies to increase defense spending, saying: “We are doing numbers like they’ve never done before.”
Colbert replied: “Getting the Nato countries to agree to more spending is an accomplishment, and I never thought I’d be standing here saying the president did a good job and I’m not because Trump’s claim is false. Nobody agreed to spend more than the previously agreed upon 2% target.”
“He is taking a victory lap for stuff that was already going to happen,” the host concluded.
