Late-night host Stephen Colbert knocked President Trump on Thursday by noting that “innocent people don’t react” by saying “I’m f—ed” when they hear they’re under investigation.
Trump said those words after Robert Mueller’s appointment to special counsel, according to Mueller’s redacted report released by the Department of Justice on Thursday.
{mosads}Colbert tore into Attorney General William Barr’s previous summary of the report and Thursday press conference detailing the contents of the report, saying it looked like Barr “skipped a few pages when he was summarizing.”
“For instance, we now know how Trump felt about Mueller’s investigation,” Colbert said of the report. “When Jeff Sessions told Trump that special counsel had been appointed, ‘the president slumped back in his chair and said, ‘Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m f—ed.’ ”
“That’s actually what I said at the beginning of your presidency, and I’m guessing that’s not how an innocent person reacts,” Colbert quipped.
Colbert, a frequent critic of the president, read from portions of Mueller’s redacted report released by the Justice Department and asked why Trump thought the special counsel probe was so “terrible.”
“Well because, according to Mueller, even though his report didn’t establish collusion with Russia, Trump was worried that ‘a thorough FBI investigation would uncover acts about the campaign and the President personally that the President could have understood to be crimes,’” Colbert read from the report.
“In other words, Trump probably thought he broke the law and now his past was coming for him, like in that movie, ‘I Know What I Did Last Summer.’”
The details of Trump’s reaction were included in notes obtained by Mueller from Jody Hunt, Sessions’s chief of staff at the time.
Trump was livid with Sessions after finding out about Mueller’s appointment and said his attorney general at the time should resign, according to the report.
“How could you let this happen, Jeff?” Trump asked Sessions, adding that he had “let [him] down.”
Sessions recalled that Trump said to him, “you were supposed to protect me,” or “words to that effect,” according to the Mueller report.
They reportedly agreed that Sessions would submit his resignation to the White House and Sessions handed in his letter the next day, according to Mueller’s report.