Colbert on Trump special master ruling: ‘This decision is bonkers’
Stephen Colbert, along with all the other late-night hosts, returned from end-of-summer holidays to recount a federal investigation into Trump’s storage of federally classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after an FBI raid in August. “Turns out, stashing top-secret government documents in the basement of your country club is, to use some technical jargon, super illegal,” the Late Show host noted.
Given the national security implications of the documents, most legal scholars assumed a federal judge wouldn’t do anything to hinder the investigation by the justice department. But on Monday, federal judge Aileen Cannon granted Trump’s request for an independent “special master” to sort relevant documents from those protected by attorney-client privilege, and barred the justice department from using the seized materials until that work is done.
“You know the old saying: ‘Justice delayed is just what he wants cuz he just needs time to shred the evidence,’” Colbert joked.
Cannon’s order also instructs the special master to look out specifically for documents potentially shielded by executive privilege. “But he’s not the executive any more!” Colbert exclaimed. “Joe Biden is. So he doesn’t have any privilege here. That’s like saying to a bad cop, ‘All right, you’re fired. Gimme your badge and your gun but you can keep the car because we know you love the siren. And you can keep the gun.’
“This decision is bonkers,” said Colbert of the special master designation. “So why is Judge Cannon going so far out on this very, very stupid legal limb? I don’t know, maybe because she was appointed by the former president and confirmed just days after the presidential election in 2020.
“So she’s a brand-new judge, who was hand-picked by the guy doing the crimes to preside over the jurisdiction that includes the place where he was committing the crimes,” he concluded. “That’s like if the head ref of the Super Bowl was Tom Brady’s dad.”
Jimmy Kimmel
“What happened this summer?” asked Jimmy Kimmel upon his return from a summer away from television. “Women lost the right to choose, monkeypox spread and Batgirl was cancelled. I’ll never go away again, I promise.
“Speaking of going away, Trump is in serious legal trouble,” he continued. “I’ve been trying to understand how he could possibly think he had the right to take all those documents to his house. It’s weird that a person who barely reads would even want documents. It’s like finding out your dog collects stamps.
“Trump keeps claiming he declassified the documents, which first of all, he didn’t,” he added. “Second of all, even if he had, which he didn’t, that’s even
more crazy. That’s like finding your wife in bed with another guy and she’s like, ‘It’s OK, I took my ring off first.’”
In other news, Russia announced a new travel ban for life to 25 Americans, including the secretary of commerce, six US senators and the actor Ben Stiller. “Funny, every Russian we sanction is some sweaty evil oligarch who dumps poison in the ocean or something. Russia turns around and bans Zoolander,” Kimmel mused.
Trevor Noah
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah pondered the appointment of the “special master” to handle classified documents seized at Mar-a-Lago. “What’s going to be interesting is who they pick for this job, because the judge gave each side until Friday to submit a list of suggestions together,” he noted. “I guess the judge is hoping that they’ll overlap?”
Such common ground will be difficult, Noah assumed, given that “the Department of Justice is gonna submit the names of former attorney generals and FBI directors, and the list from Trump’s side is going to be Jared [Kushner], the Hamburglar, a paper shredder on top of a toilet.
“Once again, Donald Trump has exposed a part of America that I’m willing to bet nobody knew existed,” Noah added, noting that after watching “10 million hours of Law and Order” he’d still never heard of a special master. “Once again, thanks to Trump, because of his hard work and dedication to doing crimes, we’ve all learned something new today.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers took a deep dive into the criminal investigation into Trump, in which he “apparently just jack[ed] a bunch of closely guarded government secrets from the White House and keeping them in the closet of his gold-plated swamp hotel the way the rest of us hoard old receipts from CVS”.
The month of August, in news terms, was “about three centuries long”, so Meyers reminded that those documents were some of the most sensitive that the government has – material that is meant to be held only at secure government facilities. In other words, Trump put potentially compromising intelligence information “in the basement of Trump’s Palm Beach wedding venue for dentists and their second wives, where a bunch of spies or tourists or Trump’s lumpy adult sons could just wander around and see them”.
And on top of that, some of the document folders were reportedly empty. “Where did the documents that were in those folders go?” Meyers wondered. “Has Trump been giving them out as party gifts to club members? When you sit down at your table, does the menu give you a choice of chicken, fish or nuclear codes?
“All this time, I thought foreign spies had to go to extreme lengths to infiltrate highly secure government buildings,” he said, “and in reality it turns out all they need to do is sidle up to Trump at the omelette bar.”