-As President Trump's allies ramp up their attacks
on special counsel Robert Mueller,
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan
has decided now is the perfect time to get out of Washington.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
President Trump is already dealing with a mountain
of embarrassing and potentially incriminating stories.
But just before we started taping this show,
we got another one about that infamous, salacious allegation
involving Trump and a certain sex act
in a hotel room in Moscow
thanks to former FBI Director James Comey's new book.
♪♪
-We're back with our experts as we following multiple
breaking stories, including
some explosive new excerpts
from the former FBI Director
James Comey's new book.
-This is regarding Comey writing about Trump...
And it goes on...
-Oh, my God, it's real.
[ Laughter ]
It has to be.
[ Applause ]
Why would you ask the FBI Director
to investigate a pee tape if you knew for a fact
that pee tape definitely didn't exist?
That's like me saying, "Can you make sure
there isn't a tape of me in 1994
doing "Thunder Road" at karaoke and then barfing
and then slipping on the barf and farting?
[ Laughter ]
You know, I've always thought the pee tape was real.
And here's how I know.
Back when the dossier first dropped,
Trump was asked about the allegations on Fox News.
Now, pretend you're a normal, decent person
who just got elected president and someone asks you
if there is a pee tape with you in it.
You'd say something like, "That's insane!"
or "What are you talking about?"
Here's what Trump said.
-Nothing's ever gonna show up.
There's never gonna be a tape
that shows up.
There's never gonna be anything
that shows up.
Now, I would be very embarrassed
if a tape actually showed up
saying something like that.
I would be double embarrassed
because I'm saying
there is no tape.
-"If it came out, I would be embarrassed."
[ Laughter ]
That's like if your girlfriend said,
"Are you cheating on me?"
And you said, "Look into my eyes,
because what I'm going to tell you is 100% true --
It would suck if you found out about that."
[ Laughter and applause ]
Of course,
this comes in the same week that the FBI raided the office
of The President's personal attorney for evidence
about the Stormy Daniels allegations.
In a response, The President has openly floated
the possibility of shutting down
the special counsel's Russia investigation.
If you're a leader in Congress, now would be a time
to step in and exercise some oversight
over the administration.
Or if you're Paul Ryan, you can decide it's time
to get the hell out of here!
-The major breaking news
from Capitol Hill,
a seismic shake-up in Congress.
The Speaker of the House,
Paul Ryan, is telling
his friends and colleagues
he will not run for re-election.
-Today, I am announcing that
this year will be my last one
as a member of the House.
-No! You gave us Donald Trump!
You should have to live with him!
[ Laughter ]
Come on, buddy.
[ Cheers and applause ]
I mean, you can't just clog up the toilet,
and then leave the dinner party.
Stay here and get a plunger!
[ Laughter ]
Of course, for Paul Ryan, this is the logical conclusion
of his term as Speaker. After all,
he spent the entirety of Trump's presidency
ignoring the damage Trump has inflicted
on our political system and pretending not to even
read his tweets or stories about him.
-I haven't put a second
of thought into this.
It's not on my radar screen.
I'm not going to speculate
on something I haven't read.
-I didn't actually hear the comments.
I only heard about those comments.
-I'm not familiar with exactly what happened yesterday.
I've been a little busy with some other tasks.
I don't know the specifics of it. I really just don't.
-Mr. Speaker,
any comment on the Trump story?
-Hey, how you doing, Alex?
Good to see you. Thank you.
-I've decided I'm not gonna
comment on the tweets of the day
or the hour.
-You don't get to decide that!
You're the Speaker of the House.
You don't have the luxury of dealing with The President
the way the rest of us deal with a crazy person on the subway.
"I'm gonna bomb Syria! Whoo!"
"Oh, boy."
[ Laughter, cheers, and applause ]
Is he gone?
One thing Ryan has always been good at
is cloaking the politics and the mind of the Republican Party --
The politics that led to Donald Trump
and high-minded rhetoric,
as he did once again in his comments yesterday.
-I'm grateful that we have unified government
that The President with his victory gave us
so we get all these big things done.
We'll have a great record to run on.
So I'm really proud of what we've been able to do.
When I took this job, one of my conditions was that we aim high.
-Aim high? You support Donald Trump.
Did you aim high, or were you high when you aimed?
[ Laughter ]
Of course, when Ryan touts his supposed accomplishments,
he's thinking specifically of that massive corporate tax cut
that blew a nearly $2 trillion hole in the deficit,
a tax cut he once again celebrated yesterday.
-Probably the two biggest achievements for me,
our first, the major reform of our tax code
for the first time in 36 years,
which has already been a huge success for this country,
and that's something I've been working on
in my entire adult life.
-You worked on it your entire adult life?
It literally had last minute notes scribbled in the margins
that no one could read. It's like if I told my wife,
"Honey, I painted a portrait of you for our anniversary,
and I've been working on it every day for the past 10 years.
[ Laughter ]
Could you tell it was you?
So, Paul Ryan says he's been working on this tax cut
his entire adult life, and yet, when he tries to brag about
the supposed benefits for average Americans,
he bungles it, like earlier this year,
after Democrats said middle-class taxpayers would
only get crumbs compared to what corporations
and the wealthy would get,
Ryan retweeted a story about Hostess, the snack company,
giving its workers free snacks as a result of the tax cut.
Ryan added...
Dude, you're bragging that because of the tax cut,
people will get free Twinkies?
They want health care and a livable wage.
What's wrong with you?
Look, let me put it in Hostess terms.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Let me put this in Hostess terms --
If you're bragging about giving away Twinkies
while the deficit Snoballs, you're a Ding Dong.
[ Laughter ]
And that...is a Zinger.
[ Laughter and applause ]
Ryan ran through a tax cut that will cost trillions
despite spending years lecturing President Obama and Democrats
about the deficit in government spending.
Ryan even lectured then-President Obama
about deficit spending to his face when Obama
invited Republicans over to the
White House for a bipartisan
summit on healthcare reform
early in his term.
-The full 10-year cost of this
bill has $460-billion deficit.
The second 10-year cost
of this bill has
a $1.4 trillion deficit.
I think probably the most
cynical gimmick in this bill is something
that we all probably agree on.
-Look at Obama's face.
That's the face of a man thinking to himself,
[ As Obama ] "Only eight more years until
I, uh, can go kite surfing."
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] So Ryan and the GOP establishment revealed
that everything they spent eight years
pretending to care about was a scam.
Ryan wants to be remembered
as a serious intellectual,
but in reality, he'll be remembered
as accomplice to Trump,
which is dangerous because Trump is somehow
becoming even more untethered, if that's possible.
This week, he's openly floated the possibility
of firing the special counsel Robert Mueller
and attacked him by name, and yet Ryan insisted
yet again yesterday there was no need to protect Mueller
because Trump would never fire him.
-On the president, he has been
openly talking about firing
Bob Mueller, potentially firing
the Deputy Attorney General.
What are your thoughts on that? -My thoughts haven't changed.
I think they should be allowed to do their jobs.
We have a rule of law in this country,
and that's a principle we all uphold.
I have no reason to believe
that's going to happen.
-Because I've been talking to people in the White House
about it. -Talking to people
in the White House? Who?!
There is no one left in the White House.
True story -- If you hold the White House up to your ear,
you can hear the ocean.
[ Laughter ]
In reality, there's an organized effort among Trump's allies
in Congress and the right-wing media to attack Mueller
and lay the ground work for firing either Mueller
or the man who supervises Mueller,
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
Now, that effort has already been going on for some time.
But the craziest thing we have seen so far
from Trump allies and the right-wing media
came last night from Sean Hannity,
a.k.a. Cadillac Lurch.
[ Laughter ]
True story -- whenever Trump calls for him,
Hannity responds like this.
-[ Deep voice ] You rang?
[ Laughter ]
-Hannity was responding to former FBI Director James Comey
who compared Trump to a mob boss,
and Trump apparently spoke to Hannity beforehand
and knew what was coming,
because before Hannity's show, Trump tweeted...
Man, I thought Hannity was Trump's hype man,
but clearly it's the other way around.
Trump spends so much time hyping Hannity's show,
he's basically Hannity's Don King.
[ Laughter ]
So, on the show last night,
Hannity decided to take Comey's mob boss comparison
and run with it -- Run with it right off the rails.
-If Comey thinks Trump is
a mob boss, is in his eyes,
well, let's talk about a family
responsible for actual crimes.
We'll call it the head of
the notorious political cabal,
of course, Bill
and Hillary Clinton,
the Clinton crime family.
Now, the next, by the way, we're
gonna go to crime families.
Let's look at the Mueller
crime family.
Last but not least,
we have one other crime family
we want to tell you about.
And, well, this is near
and dear to Comey's heart.
We'll call it the Comey crime family.
-Wow, you know it's bad when you're making less sense
than Carrie from "Homeland."
[ Laughter ]
Now, with all of the talk
of Trump potentially firing Mueller,
Trump tried to get out ahead of the story today, tweeting...
I love when you can tell Trump didn't personally write
one of his tweets.
That thing is all lawyerly language
except for the "Unlike the Clintons!"
That was the one thing they obvious caved and let him have.
[ As Trump ] Can I call them the crooked Clintons?
[ Normal voice ] No.
[ As Trump ] Can I have three exclamation points?
[ Normal voice ] How about zero exclamation points?
[ As Trump ] How about one?
[ Normal voice ] Fine!
[ Cheers and applause ]
Just as Trump gets more dangerous,
Republicans are either quitting or egging him on.
Republicans in Congress should be reining him in.
Instead, when he calls for them they answer by saying...
-[ Deep voice ] You rang?
This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪