-President Trump and his Attorney General
are turning the Justice Department
into a political weapon to protect Trump's friends
and punish his enemies, and now Trump's
ex-Chief of Staff is speaking out.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-You might remember that in order to justify their vote
to acquit Trump in his impeachment trial,
several Republican Senators tried to reassure us
that impeachment would be a teachable moment for Trump,
that he would change his behavior,
and that he had learned his lesson.
-Enduring an impeachment is something
that nobody should like.
Even the president said he didn't want that on his résumé.
I don't blame him.
So if a call like that gets you an impeachment,
I would think he would think twice before he did it again.
-I think that he knows now
that if he is trying to do certain things,
whether it's ferreting corruption there,
in Afghanistan, whatever it is,
he needs to go through the proper channels.
-Are you confident that the president
won't seek foreign assistance again?
-I believe that the president has learned from this case.
The president has been impeached.
That's a pretty big lesson.
-You think he's learned his lesson?
He's 73 years old and he hasn't even learned
how to properly apply bronzer
all the way to the top of his face.
[ Laughter ] I mean...
[ Cheers and applause ]
For real.
Tom Hanks spent more time putting makeup on Wilson.
And sure enough, within days of being acquitted,
Trump began a campaign of exacting revenge
on impeachment witnesses
and proving that he had not learned his lesson,
as was obvious to all of us.
For example, he vindictively fired
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman,
a key impeachment witness
who received a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq.
It was an on act of petty revenge.
And, yet, Trump defended his firing of Vindman this week
by once again insisting that the impeachable offense
he committed, his phone call with the president of Ukraine,
was actually perfect.
-I obviously wasn't happy with the job he did.
First of all, he reported a false call
that wasn't what was said on the call.
What was said on the call was totally appropriate.
And I call it a perfect call.
I always will call it a perfect call.
-[ As Trump ] It was a perfect call,
as perfect as my spray tan,
applied evenly to every part of my face
so I definitely do not look like
an overcooked ham with googly eyes."
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] So now that Trump is once again
abusing his power, the Republicans who said
he learned his lesson are silent.
But there was one Republican who suddenly decided to speak up
at a paid speech yesterday,
and that's Trump's former Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Now, Kelly never spoke up
when he was Trump's Chief of Staff
during some of Trump's worst abuses and lowest moments.
But now that he's getting paid to give speeches,
John Kelly seems to have grown a conscience
and now he's suddenly criticizing Trump.
-Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly
sounding off on President Trump,
as "The Atlantic" reports,
"The retired general explained in the clearest terms yet
his misgivings with Trump's behavior
regarding North Korea, immigration, and Ukraine."
Speaking last night at Drew University,
Kelly said that, "Lieutenant Colonel
Alexander Vindman was simply following the training
he'd received as a soldier."
Kelly added, "We teach them, 'Don't follow an illegal order.
If you're ever given one, you'll raise it
with whoever gives it to you and then you tell your boss.'"
-Hey, man, I'm going to say the same thing to you
that I say about the president's spray tan --
"Too little, too late."
And then after those comments went public,
Kelly was rewarded for his belated truth telling.
The way anyone who turns on Trump is rewarded
with a nasty personal attack on Twitter.
Trump tweeted "When I terminated John Kelly,
which I couldn't do fast enough,
he knew full well that he was way over his head,
being Chief of Staff just wasn't for him.
He came in with a bang, went out with a whimper.
But like so many exes, he misses the action."
I'm sorry, do you mean the word, exes?
It's not just spelled with the letter "X."
When you say "X," people tend to think of the X-Men.
What X-Man would John Kelly be?
The one who waits a month after Magneto destroys the city
and then says, "We should have done something."
[ Laughter ]
So now Trump is in a dumb feud
with one of his former Chiefs of Staff.
Meanwhile, we're learning strange and new details
about his relationship with another one
of his former Chiefs of Staff, Reince Priebus,
and one particular very dumb obsession
Trump had with Priebus.
Now as we all know, Donald Trump is not a well-read man.
But it's still fascinating to find out the things
that he's curious about.
This week, we learned one of the strangest,
dumbest things about Trump yet
and it requires a bit of explanation.
Priebus was Trump's first Chief of Staff.
And he was from Wisconsin, which you may know,
is referred to as the Badger State.
And according to a new book by the Trump administration
called "Sinking in the Swamp,"
Trump was obsessed with badgers
and he kept asking Priebus questions about badgers,
even in situations where it wasn't appropriate.
These are real highlights from the book.
"When Reince Priebus was the White House Chief of Staff,
President Donald Trump repeatedly asked him
whether badgers, the state animal of Priebus' home state
of Wisconsin, are mean to people,
how they work, and how aggressive they can get.
"Are they mean to people?" Trump at least twice asked Priebus
in the opening months of his presidency,
"or are they friendly creatures?"
Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a personality
or if it was boring,
what kind of damage could a badger do to a person
with its flashy, sharp claws?
Oh, my God, Trump is obsessed with badgers.
He's probably curious because he can relate to the badger.
I mean, look at him. He looks like a mama badger fending off
a hoard of coyotes. [ Laughter ]
[ Applause ]
I mean, there's so many questions about this.
First of all, Trump want to know how badgers work,
like, what does he mean by work?
Does he mean, "Do they have hearts
that pump blood to the rest of their bodies?"
or does he mean "Do badgers have jobs?"
[ As Trump ] So what do these badgers do for a living?
Do they build dams like beavers?
You know, 'cause I'm -- I'm in real estate, too."
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] Seriously think about how insane this is.
The president of the United States
has shown more genuine curiosity about badgers and how they work
than literally any other subject in his portfolio.
He's 70 going on 7.
Was he asked for environmental reasons,
or for his second-grade essay project?
[ As Trump, monotone ] This summer, I learned
how badgers work and if they are mean to people.
They have personalities and are not boring and stupid
like my ex, John Kelly."
[ Laughter and applause ] [ Normal voice ] In fact,
according to the book,
Trump showed more genuine curiosity about badgers
than actual policy issues.
For example, just this week he intervened directly
into the criminal case of one of his cronies, Roger Stone,
seen here dressed like a Bond villain,
who instead of petting a white cat pets a Wisconsin badger.
Stone was convicted of lying to Congress
and witness tampering to help cover up the Russia conspiracy
as part of Robert Mueller's investigation.
Prosecutors originally recommended up to nine years
in jail, but then Trump whined about how unfair it was
on Twitter, and his Justice Department,
led by Attorney General Bill Barr
intervened to change it to a much more lenient sentence.
And yesterday Trump celebrated that move
claiming no one could even specify
what Stone was guilty of.
-I want to thank the Justice Department
for seeing this horrible thing.
They saw the horribleness of a nine-year sentence
for doing nothing.
Nine years for doing something
that nobody even can define what he did.
-Just because you can't define it,
doesn't mean nobody can define it.
I mean, you can ask your lawyer.
he should at least be able to look it up.
I mean, he's always showing us his phone.
[ As Giuliani ] Boss, again, I Googled "witness tampering,"
and it says right here, apply ointment as necessary,
then use a cooling pad -- Oh, sorry, wrong tab.
I also Googled "what to do when you sit on your own balls."
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] What's clear here is that Trump and Barr
are turning the Justice Department into a tool
for Trump's personal political benefit.
In fact, Barr is taking control of cases
that are of personal interest to Trump
and has reportedly even made himself
into Trump's personal defender.
-Barr describing an expansive new profile
in "The New Yorker" as attempting to maximize
executive power, and, "Like no Attorney General
since the Watergate era,
he has acted as the president's political sword and shield."
-That's right, Barr is now Trump's sword and shield,
which is true metaphorically.
But you know Trump would also love a literal sword and shield.
I'm surprised that they don't just let him walk around
the White House with a sword from Medieval Times
and a Burger King crown so he can yell
[ As Trump ] Where are you, badgers?!
Don't try to charm me with your winning personality.
[ Normal voice ] And if it seems to you like Barr is acting
more like Trump's personal defense attorney
than the Attorney General of the United States,
just remember at his confirmation hearing
last year, Barr revealed that he literally did interview
to become Trump's defense attorney
during the Mueller investigation
before Trump appointed him Attorney General.
-It was a very brief meeting where essentially the president
wanted to know -- Yeah, he said, "Oh, you know Bob Mueller.
How well do you know Bob Mueller?
I told him how well I knew Bob Mueller,
and he was interested in that, wanted to know what I thought
about Mueller's integrity and so forth and so on.
So he asked me for my phone number.
I gave it to him, and I never heard from him again.
-I mean, I know why he never called you.
He was probably distracted by some dumb thought about animals
that had nothing to do with what you were talking about.
Trump was probably sitting there
while you were talking thinking to himself,
[ As Trump ] I wonder which animals are nice
and which ones are mean.
I bet squirrels are nice and pigeons are mean.
Elephants are nice, Bobcats are mean.
Groundhogs are neutral.
No one ever had a problem with groundhogs.
Oh, and penguins are fancy because they wear tuxedos!
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] So an imbecile President whose only interest
in his own self-preservation is turning the Justice Department
into a political weapon for his own benefit,
Trump keeps digging himself deeper and deeper,
much like Trump's great friend, the majestic badger,
whose mating call echoes
throughout the forests of Wisconsin.
And I imagine if Trump were to hear that call,
he might say something like...
-They call it a perfect call.
I always will call it a perfect call.
[ Laughter ] -This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪