Late-night hosts discussed Kelly’s interview with Gayle King, Jared and Ivanka’s security clearances, and the White House’s symbiosis with Fox News

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Late-night hosts talk R Kelly’s non-defense, Trump’s contested security clearances and the New Yorker’s damning report on Fox News.

Stephen Colbert

“Everybody out there is talking about the big TV broadcast about that sexual predator in the entertainment industry,” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday’s Late Show, “and unfortunately, I have to narrow that down.”

Colbert was referring specifically to the disgraced R&B star R Kelly, whose raving interview with Gayle King, in which he defended himself against multiple charges of physical and sexual abuse, made headlines on Wednesday.

To recap, in case you’ve “been living under some beautiful, comforting, noise-cancelling rock”, reports of Kelly’s abuse of underage girls, such as allegedly holding them against their will, have circulated since 2002 but gained prominence in recent weeks through the Lifetime docu-series Surviving R Kelly. Last month, Kelly was charged with 10 counts of aggravated sexual abuse in Cook county, Illinois; he pleaded not guilty.

The interview with King “was a chance for Kelly to try to reassure the world that he is normal”, Colbert explained. “But instead, he went with … not that.” A still of the interview, in which Kelly, hysterically crying, gesticulates wildly over a stock-still King, went viral. “Wow, he shouted and he cried but it was completely unconvincing – for Pete’s sake, he forgot to say he liked beer,” Colbert summarized over a picture of a distraught Brett Kavanaugh.

Colbert pointed out that Kelly refused to address his documented past with underage girls (he was acquitted of child abuse images charges in 2008), telling King: “You beat your case, you beat your case.”

“No Mr Kelly, that was your last case,” Colbert rebutted. “This is the remix to conviction.”

But R Kelly isn’t the only cultural figure in the hot seat, and Colbert returned in another segment to his perpetual target, Donald Trump. “There are so many investigations swirling around Donald Trump right now that R Kelly is like, ‘I’m glad I’m not that guy,’” he said.

First in the list of this week’s scandals are reports of Trump’s ordering of top-secret security clearances for daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, over the objections of intelligence officials.

And while charges of nepotism seem appropriate, Ivanka’s clearance makes sense, Colbert joked, because she “needs classified intel on China’s human rights abuses to see if it is possible to pay her workers any less”.

In other scandal news, Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, returned to Capitol Hill yesterday for private testimony to the House intelligence panel. One thing probably discussed? The checks Trump wrote to reimburse Cohen for payments to silence Stormy Daniels, “an accounting method known in the payroll industry as a crime”, Colbert said.

Copies of those checks have been obtained by the New York Times, whose analysis shows that Trump led “parallel lives” in which he would mix his presidential schedule with time to send money to Cohen. “I totally believe the man would lead parallel lives, he lies so much,” Colbert admitted. “We’re eventually going to find out about his secret family he has stashed in the attic of Trump Tower.”

Samantha Bee

On Full Frontal, Samantha Bee unpacked Jane Mayer’s latest bombshell article for the New Yorker: a full account of the synergy and propaganda loop between Fox News and the White House.

Mayer reported that high-level Fox News editors killed a story by reporter Diana Falzone about Trump’s hush money to Stormy Daniels because owner Rupert Murdoch favored Trump during the election.

“In other words, Fox News buried a woman’s story about Trump burying a woman’s story, then buried another story about that story being buried,” Bee explained. “It’s like watching Inception – I’m a little confused, extremely frustrated and men keep explaining why the story is totally cool if you just, like, really think about it.”

Furthermore, the article claims that Murdoch has formed close relationships with the White House, allegedly talking to Jared Kushner every day. “The only thing Jared Kushner is good at, other than moisturizing with live snails, is making powerful men feel paternal towards him.”

The ties between the network and the president run deep, especially when it comes to the channel’s most lucrative host, Sean Hannity. Hannity and Trump allegedly speak almost nightly, “like a booty call from the world’s grossest booty”, Bee said.

In sum, Fox News in the Trump era “has grown from a simple, old-fashioned propaganda factory into a new kind of state television that’s arguably as powerful as the president it created”, Bee said.

“But at least Trump is term-limited. We’ll be living under Fox’s influence as long as there’s a supply of fresh teenage blood to keep Rupert Murdoch undead.”

