-Well, we're back from a two-week break,
and I haven't checked in on the news yet,
so let me just take a look at these cue cards here.
Russia is reportedly on the verge of invading Ukraine.
Well, that's not good.
Fox News and the Republican Party
want to put Hillary Clinton in jail
for a made-up thing again. Oh, boy.
Mike Lindell wants to send pillows to anti-vax truckers
in Canada. Yikes!
And Donald Trump took classified documents to Mar-A-Lago
and flushed official White House records down the toilet.
Alright, well, anyone could have predicted that part.
[ Laughter ]
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Theme music plays ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Let me tell you how hard it is to be a talk show host.
It's not.
But there are still some rough moments, okay?
For example, two weeks ago,
we went on break for the Olympics,
and then a few hours after we taped our last show,
I'm at home, minding my own business,
when I see this headline.
"'Masked Singer' judges walk out after Rudy Giuliani reveal."
And I didn't have a show to talk about that!
[ Laughter ]
I couldn't talk to my kids about it,
because, long story short, they're Trump supporters.
I don't want to get into it.
I don't want to get into it. They're doing it to punish me.
I don't think they actually believe it.
[ Laughter ]
Point is, I needed my show.
So I called the president of NBC and said,
"Did you hear about this Rudy news?"
And he said, "How did you get this number?"
And then I said, "Can you cancel the Olympics?"
And he said no, and I said,
"But Rudy was on 'The Masked Singer.'"
And he said, "Seth, do you really think
this is the last crazy thing Rudy Giuliani is ever gonna do?"
And I said no.
And he said, "Okay, don't ever call me again."
But I did find a solution.
I took my desk to Central Park,
and I did a monologue in the middle of the night
for all the joggers and squirrels.
[ Laughter ]
I even tried posting a bunch of jokes
on Donald Trump's new Twitter rip-off called Truth Social,
which apparently went live last night.
But like lots of people, I couldn't even log in,
because when it launched,
select users who tried to create accounts
were repeatedly met with a red error warning --
"Something went wrong. Please try again."
Though, by the time you find yourself signing up
for Donald Trump's social-media site,
something already went wrong.
[ Laughter ]
But I'm guessing they'll try again.
If you were first in line to sign up for Truth Social,
you probably got some free time on your hands.
"Well, I'm just sitting here waiting for JFK Jr.
to reappear at the Meadowlands with Elvis
and the Loch Ness monster to prove the election was stolen.
I guess I'll try logging in again."
[ Laughter ]
I really enjoy how vague the error message is.
"Something went wrong,"
like even they don't know what the problem is.
Usually you get an error code or something,
but Trump's site just gives you a shrug emoji that says,
"What were you expecting? This thing's a cluster [Bleep],"
which makes sense because the guy in charge of the site
is former GOP Congressman Devin Nunes.
Remember him?
The guy who always looks like the valet
who forgot where your car was, or what cars even were.
He said on Fox News this weekend,
he was hoping the site would be fully functional
by the end of next month.
- This week, we'll begin to roll out people
on the Apple App Store.
That's gonna be awesome because we're gonna get
so many more people that are gonna be on the platform.
And then, look, our goal is --
and I think we're gonna hit it --
I think, by the end of March,
we're gonna be fully operational,
at least within the United States.
-By the end of March?
This is the digital age.
Everything is measured in nanoseconds,
and you're moving at the speed of Civil War letters home.
[ Laughter ]
So, anyway, I was too late for the Rudy news
and I couldn't post about it on Trump's site.
But unfortunately, there are plenty of other
Trump-adjacent pro-coup weirdos up to their usual weirdness.
Just to give you an idea of how insane the world is right now,
here's a real headline I came across the other day.
"MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and '10,000 pillows'
blocked from joining Ottawa protest."
So, Lindell wanted to show his support for the convoy
of anti-vax truckers paralyzing Ottawa
by sending them pillows,
but he was blocked by the Canadian government,
which he explained on far-right TV channel Newsmax,
from what to me looks suspiciously
like a fake private plane.
-Tell me what happened today at the border.
Did you get the -- did you get the pillows in?
-No, we've got a -- we got a new permit.
We got a permit. I've left there.
I'm not up there now.
I'm actually coming from another state.
I have to go to another state. My trucker's there.
He's gonna cross -- gonna try tomorrow morning.
They made us get another permit, a different -- another permit.
I don't know. Regulations, red tape.
We're gonna try again tomorrow morning,
and we're gonna head into Ottawa.
-I can't believe we're living in a time
with our very own Wile E. Coyote.
[As Lindell] we're gonna send 10,000 pillows to Ottawa,
and then I'm gonna tie myself to a rocket
and shoot myself across the border.
[Normal voice] Also, why are you so vague about your location?
"I'm coming from another state to another state"?
Are you a fugitive?
Did you get put on the FBI's "least wanted" list?
And let's take a look at that background again.
I mean, that's got to be fake.
It's like a Zoom background or a TV set
he has constructed in his living room
so he can make it look like he's on a private plane,
or it's a real private plane that doesn't actually fly
and he just has it parked on the street outside his house.
And I will say, Lindell looks less like a guy
who sells pillows and more like a guy
who sells grounded private planes
for the purposes of impressing people on Zoom calls.
[As Lindell] Hey, check out my new product,
Hot Tub Slices!
It comes with a champagne flute and two professional models.
[Normal voice] Hot Tub Slices. We came back hot.
[ Laughter ]
Take two weeks off, you let the brain rest,
and you come back with Hot Tub Slices.
[ Laughter ]
So, things are tense everywhere right now.
As we speak, hundreds of thousands of Russian troops
are amassed on the Ukrainian border
amid warnings of an imminent invasion by Russia.
Now, I'm no foreign-policy expert,
but my personal opinion is a war would be catastrophic
and the world should do everything in its power
to prevent one, which is why I'm glad world leaders
keep insisting diplomacy is still an option,
including the possibility of a summit between Biden and Putin.
-Overnight, president Biden agreed in principle
to meet with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin.
This was in response to a proposal
from the French President, Emmanuel Macron.
Unclear how real of a possibility this is.
The White House says, in theory, the president would do it,
but only if Putin holds off on invading Ukraine.
-Fine, go for it. Anything to stop a war.
Let Biden meet with Putin and put him to sleep
with stories about the mean streets of Scranton
and the Acela schedule for the Eastern seaboard.
It's still better than the summit Trump did
where he screamed at reporters about insane conspiracy theories
and held up a soccer ball he got from Putin
like a kid on Christmas who was expecting a PS5.
"This isn't what I meant when I said I wanted to play FIFA!"
I mean, maybe Biden can give the soccer ball back to Putin.
[As Biden] "Sorry, it's a little deflated.
Trump sat on it. He thought it was an egg
and treated it like a Horton situation."
[Normal voice] Obviously, world leaders
must do everything possible
to de-escalate and pursue diplomacy.
And yet some Republicans and right-wing pundits
have claimed the crisis
is actually just a manufactured distraction by Democrats
to divert attention from, among other things,
Hillary Clinton, who has once again
become an obsession for them for reasons
that, unsurprisingly, are total bull[bleep].
-Is it all just a ruse?
The administration hitting the panic button on Russia.
I questioned whether or not the whole thing was a ruse,
with Jake Sullivan coming out so hysterical over the weekend,
telling us to get out of Ukraine
and that Russia is gonna invade today.
Obviously, in retrospect,
he was trying to change the conversation
from Hillary Clinton and her bad behavior --
-Uh, Maria? -And her dirty tricks
against Donald Trump. -Maria.
-They were spying on Trump, as a candidate
and as the president of the United States,
from the White House?
Why is this not the biggest story of the year?
-This is the biggest scandal -- spying scandal -- ever.
-What you're talking about is further than Watergate.
-I think this is far worse than Watergate, quite frankly.
-Hillary Clinton hired people who hacked into Trump's home
and office computers, before and during his presidency,
and planted evidence that he colluded with Russia.
Yeah, you heard that right.
-Yeah, we heard that right.
You just said it wrong.
Because none of it is true.
Disentangling the web of lies here is nearly impossible.
Basically, Fox News inaccurately described a claim
that had been cherry-picked
from a court filing by a special counsel
assigned by former attorney general Bill Barr
to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation,
and then they lied about that filing to the point
where the special counsel himself, John Durham,
distanced himself from the Fox News freakout.
If you ask them to explain what was actually in the filing,
they'd probably say... -I don't know.
Regulations, red tape.
[ Laughter ]
-But suffice it to say, Hillary Clinton did not hack
into Trump's campaign or spy on Trump's White House,
and she certainly didn't plant evidence.
For one thing, why would you have to plant evidence on a guy
who screams evidence into TV cameras all the time?
That would be like the cops planting a bag of cocaine
at a meth lab.
They're making it sound like Hillary Clinton
was in a van outside Trump Tower,
hacking into the mainframe "Ocean's Eleven"-style.
"I'm into the Trump mainframe!"
The password was just 'password' spelled wrong."
[ Laughter ] Also, you think Hillary Clinton
was capable of hacking Donald Trump
and digitally spying on him?
Do I need to remind you how bad she was with technology?
-I don't know who created Pokémon Go.
[ Laughter ]
But I'm trying to figure out how we get them
to have Pokémon Go To the Polls.
-Yeah, that person hacked Trump's campaign
and planted evidence.
Sounds like my mom drunkenly asking me
how to use FaceTime on my tablet.
"So, it's called an iPad.
Does that mean you need an iPen?
Do not take away my gin and tonic!"
I mean, my God, it's been years,
and they're still obsessed with Hillary.
I'm gonna tell you what my therapist told me
about the Rudy Giuliani "Masked Singer" news.
"Let it go." [ Laughter ]
And yet I just can't quit you, you goofy bastard.
[ Laughter ] Of course, if anything,
it was Trump who was tampering with evidence.
As we now know, he reportedly had a habit
of flushing papers down White House toilets --
so, you know, Happy Presidents' Day --
and that some of the White House --
some of the White House documents
that Donald Trump improperly took to his Mar-a-Lago residence
were clearly marked as classified,
including documents at the top-secret level.
Trump probably let the guests flip through them
for an extra fee when they booked their stays.
"Okay, so the breakfast buffet is 100 dollars extra.
There's also a day pass to the swimming pool
and spa that costs 200 dollars.
And for 300 dollars,
you can peruse a classified Pentagon document
that confirms the existence of aliens
walking among us in the form of Midwestern pillow salesmen."
[ Laughter ] "So, just the spa?
Okay, just the spa."
The right keeps ginning up manufactured outrages
about their favorite targets
because they don't have anything serious to talk about.
They're too busy dismantling democracy,
sending pillows to Canadian truckers,
and going on "The Masked Singer,"
which if you ask me, is...
-Far worse than Watergate, quite frankly.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
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