Kimmel on taking classified files seriously: ‘Republicans have believed that since Monday’ | Late-night TV roundup
Written by on January 12, 2023
Jimmy Kimmel
The 2023 Golden Globes suffered its lowest ratings ever on Tuesday evening, “and they kinda deserve it”, said Jimmy Kimmel on Wednesday’s show, after a 2021 LA Times investigation found the show’s organizing group, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, had no black members.
After a year away, the group now counts six black journalists as members. “Let’s put it this way: Republicans in the House of Representatives have five black members,” said Kimmel. “So this is not exactly the It’s A Small World ride now.”
Kimmel then pivoted to ongoing GOP outrage over a handful of classified documents found and returned by Biden staffers at a private office at the University of Pennsylvania. “Can’t we tie a big spoon to these documents like they do with the gas station bathroom key?” he wondered. “We’re one episode of Storage Wars away from finding out who killed JFK.”
Biden staffers are now looking “everywhere he could’ve possibly left documents – his knapsack, his pill organizer, under the arch at the 1904 World’s Fair”, Kimmel continued. “They could be anywhere. They could be in a birthday card he sent to his grandkids next to a crisp $2 bill. No one knows.
“Any time documents are mishandled, top-secret documents, it needs to be taken seriously,” he added. “That’s something Republicans and Democrats believe. Although Republicans have only believed it since Monday.”
Stephen Colbert
On the Late Show, Stephen Colbert mocked the Fox News host Sean Hannity for praising, in an interview with House GOP members, “more diversity in the Republican party”.
“Absolutely, just look at the Republican rainbow of inclusion,” he said of Hannity’s all-white audience of Republican lawmakers. “The full spectrum … they’ve got eggshell, vanilla, Band-Aid, Band-Aid with glasses, everything.”
He then homed in on the newly elected New York congressman George Santos, who “has a long history of stretching the truth – by never telling it”. Among numerous exposed fabrications, a new complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission accuses Santos of extensive lies about campaign finances.
The complaint alleges Santos loaned $705,000 of his own money to his campaign, even though 2020 records indicate he only had a fortune of $55,000. “Fair enough, but what about all of his other names,” Colbert wondered, because up until he ran for Congress, Santos used the aliases Anthony Zabrovsky and Anthony Devolder. “He has so many aliases, he had to swear in on two Bibles and a Torah.”
Republican officials on Long Island held a press conference on Wednesday morning calling on Santos to resign, calling his campaign full of “deceit, lies and fabrication”.
To this “stunning rebuke from his own party”, Santos told Capitol Hill reporters he will not resign – “which means he’s gonna resign”, said Colbert.
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers looked ahead to how “unhinged the next two years are going to be with these loons in charge of the House” after Kevin McCarthy’s election as speaker.
“The drama that unfolded last week was essentially an extension of the ongoing war between establishment Republicans and the Trump wing of the party,” he explained. “And the Trump wing won.
“After McCarthy finally crawled over the finish line on the 15th ballot by yielding, perhaps even relenting, to the demands of the Maga wing of his party, McCarthy openly thanked Trump for his support.”
McCarthy told reporters that people shouldn’t doubt Trump’s influence, as he made phone calls to secure the final votes for McCarthy’s 15th and first victorious vote as speaker.
“I actually believe that, because the only thing Donald Trump is good at is making phone calls,” said Meyers. “Making calls is Trump’s only skill. All he has to do is sit there in his pajamas in front of his television and ramble for an hour about toilets or windmills until the person at the other end of the call says fine, I’ll give in, I’ll vote for Kevin, just stop talking about how many times you have to flush.”
