-Welcome back! -Hello!
-I always -- I want to start by saying thank you, of course,
because, of course, you have a show tonight.
You're making time for us. I really appreciate that.
-It's all right.
Ten news stories will break between this moment.
-So in a way, I'm doing you a favor
because if you were at work right now,
you would be writing something that would already be old
by the time you're on at 9:00.
-Yes.
-So I'm just giving you an hour off.
-You know there -- I'm a disorganized person.
And I have bad time management.
And so I've always had this problem
ever since I started doing work like this,
where I produce stuff that doesn't make it on to the show
for whatever reason -- other stuff goes long
or I can't end an interview on time -- I have no discipline.
So there's always been some stuff I have to kick out.
But now every single day, the entire show I throw away
two hours before air time and have to invent a whole new one.
I feel like I should just come in at 8:00
before the 9:00 show and be like, "Hit me now!
Hit me now! I'm just going to ad-lib the whole thing."
I threw away a whole show every day.
-It is nuts.
This is an unprecedented time.
And it has affected not only our show, not only your show,
but it actually affected your signoff the other night.
-Oh, God.
Yeah, you know, there are --
Like, throughout the history of people doing news on television,
there has been all these, like, really noble signoffs --
"courage," you know, "good night and good luck."
-Yes. -People do, like, you know?
It's been all these very serious ones.
And people don't necessarily try them anymore.
I have inadvertently developed one
that I started doing without trying to.
-It started when I was talking about Steve Bannon,
the White House strategist guy. You know, the grim reaper guy?
-It already feels like a million years ago, yeah.
-I know.
He was in Congress.
And he wasn't answering their questions
because his lawyer was advising him not to.
And his lawyer was advising him not to
because he was on the phone with the White House.
And the White House was saying,
"We don't want Steve answering those questions."
Turns out Steve Bannon's lawyer is also the lawyer
for the guy at the White House he was talking to.
-So, here's your new signoff, which I think -- I don't know.
I think it's as good as all of them.
-Okay. -Let's take a look.
-Having somebody on those two different sides of the story
both represented by the same attorney?
That's weird. That does it for us tonight.
[ Laughter ]
-"That's weird. Good night." -"That's weird. Good night!"
Yeah. Sleep well. [ Cheers and applause ]
-I'm sure you'll talk about this, this evening.
The memo.
We talked a little bit about the memo.
Do you think the release of this memo,
which seems inevitable at this point,
do you think it will escalate the investigation
into Trump and Russia ties, if that's even possible?
Or do you think the takeaway, when we look back on this memo,
will be this was a degrading of our institutions
that someone in Congress would basically
go after the Justice Department and the FBI like this?
-Well, the memo isn't part of --
It isn't like something that's been revealed
from the investigation.
The memo is part of the Trump White House
and the Trump supporters in Congress
trying to make the investigation go away.
So this is part of their defense against the investigation.
And there was a guy who was a part of the Trump campaign,
he was a foreign adviser --
foreign policy adviser to the campaign.
And he had been caught up in a Russian spy ring
in New York City in 2013.
And, like, FBI counterintelligence
had been involved in, like, breaking up the spy ring.
And people went to prison. And it was for real.
Then he turns up on the Trump campaign,
and in the middle of the Trump campaign,
he goes to Russia and gives an anti-U.S./pro-Putin speech.
So, like, the counterintelligence folks
are interested in this guy
because they're supposed to monitor people
who might be foreign agents in the United States.
And they got warrants to surveil him
starting during the campaign.
And it got renewed a bunch of times,
including into the Trump campaign.
This whole memo thing is about trying to make it a scandal
that it was renewed the most recent time it was renewed.
-Yeah.
-"And that means there should be no investigation."
It's like, "No, dude."
You had the guy with the Russian spies working on --
and then going to Moscow and being like,
"I love Putin. I hate America."
Like, of course, the FBI is gonna look into him.
So they're gonna try to say
that means there shouldn't be a Russia investigation.
And it's been a very big distraction,
which I think is effective.
But I don't think it will -- I don't think it will change
anything on Robert Mueller's to-do list.