Seth Meyers: ‘Eight times makes it seem like an obvious crime’

After a weekend in Los Angeles for the Emmy awards, Seth Meyers returned to Late Night to discuss the snowballing story of Trump apparently urging the president of Ukraine for information on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who has business in the country.

It’s a difficult story to follow, Meyers acknowledged, so he started with a recap: earlier this year, “the president said in public that he would welcome the help of a foreign government in interfering in the 2020 election, and his personal lawyer was trying to get Ukraine to do exactly that,” referring to Rudy Giuliani’s scrapped plan to visit the Ukraine on Trump’s behalf.

Things started to get “more suspicious,” Meyers said, in August, when it was reported that Trump was considering blocking $250m in military aid to Ukraine.

And then last week, numerous outlets reported that a phone call between Trump and unknown foreign leader, in which Trump made “a promise,” prompted an intelligence official to file a formal whistleblower complaint. Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal added that Trump had pressured the Ukrainian president to look into Biden’s son at least eight times on one phone call.

“Eight times makes it seem like a pretty obvious crime,” Meyers observed. “It’s like if you went on trial for stabbing a guy and said it was an accident – ‘He fell on the knife’ – and they said: eight times? ‘Yeah, he was wearing roller skates.’”

Since the “eight times” news broke on Friday, Trump has offered the full array of explanations, excuses, and deflections, often contradicting himself or Giuliani, who made the cable news circuit. Basically, said Meyers, Trump veered from “‘It doesn’t matter what I discuss,’ to ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ to ‘We talked about Biden,’ to ‘It was a perfect conversation,’ to ‘If I did talk about Biden, I’d have the right to talk about Biden,’ to ‘I didn’t pressure anyone.’”

In conclusion, “the president of the United States allegedly used his power to extort a foreign leader to meddle in the 2020 election on his behalf,” said Meyers. “If this isn’t impeachable behavior, I don’t know what is.”

Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Like when Mike Tyson bit Holyfield’s ear’

In Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also discussed the developing Trump-Ukraine bombshell, beginning with the phone call that prompted the whistleblower complaint. Trump made that call on 25 July, Kimmel noted – just a day after the conclusion of the Mueller testimonies on his report, which investigated whether Trump colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 election.

In other words, “a day after the conclusion of a major investigation into whether he got help in the election from a foreign leader, he gets on the phone and asks for help from another foreign leader,” said Kimmel. “The only thing I can compare it to is when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear … and then bit Evander Holyfield’s other ear.”

The “bigly question” now, Kimmel continued, is whether Trump used America’s routine financial aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip for gaining information on his chief political rival’s son. Trump, of course, has maintained that his conversation with the Ukrainian president was unassailable. “I said absolutely nothing wrong, it was perfect,” he told reporters on camera over the weekend. “It was a perfect call.”

Kimmel was not convinced. “The bottom line is: it would appear the president of the United States has used his office to dig up dirt on an opponent,” he said, “and Democrats in Congress are now thinking very seriously about threatening to maybe consider almost doing something about it.”

The Republicans, meanwhile, have mostly stayed quiet, relying on an argument which boils down to, as Kimmel said, “number one: President Trump would never pressure a foreign government to get dirt on the Biden family, and number two: of course he did! Everybody does that – it’s politics.”