Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Brittany Shammas.
Host Stephen Colbert held up a copy of “The Book of Gutsy Women” at the start of the segment, but quickly set it aside to get Clinton’s take on the Trump-Ukraine controversy.
“Your fault for coming on Ukraine week,” he quipped.
Clinton was game. Asked by Colbert whether it was time to, “dare I say, lock him up,” she said that launching an impeachment inquiry to look at the evidence was the right step. The Founding Fathers, she said, created a provision for impeachment for times when the president has “subverted the Constitution, has abused power, has put the nation at risk.”
“I believe strongly that this particular incident has had such a huge impact because we’ve known for a long time that he was a corrupt businessman who cheated people, and we’ve known that he and his campaign asked for aid from Russia,” she said of Trump. “We’ve known that. But to see him in the office of the president putting his own personal and political interests ahead of the national security of our country just pierced through whatever confusion or denial people had.”
Shortly before the show was taped, the Wall Street Journal reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was listening in on the phone call at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, in which Trump sought the Ukrainian president’s assistance in investigating his main political rival, former vice president Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter Biden.
Colbert didn’t miss the chance to get Clinton’s thoughts on the revelation.
“How many times when you were secretary of state did you have to say to Barack Obama, you can’t extort foreign countries to get dirt on your political enemies?” he asked.
“Yeah, that never happened,” Clinton responded, laughing.
She said that in a moment like that, the secretary of state’s job is to “make sure that, number one, he knows what the president is going to say on those calls,” which she described as “usually highly prepared” with the help of the State Department, Pentagon and others.
“And because you’ve got a president who doesn’t listen to anybody and doesn’t follow instructions whatsoever,” she continued, drawing laughs from the audience, “I’m not sure [if] they’ve even given up on trying to give him any sorts of preparation because they don’t know what he’s going to say.”
How would she feel as secretary of state, Colbert asked, if the president was “sending Rudy Giuliani out to actually handle foreign policy.”
Clinton didn’t mince words: While presidents or secretaries of state might use an envoy or special adviser to relay a message, she said, “again, it is supposed to be carefully thought through.”
From there, the talk finally turned to the book, with the co-authors chatting about the experience of writing a book together for the first time — a process Chelsea Clinton said was made more difficult by her mother’s insistence on writing longhand. But when Colbert held up a page of Clinton’s handwritten notes, joking that they “look a bit like you’re up in a cabin writing your manifesto,” she was ready for a change of topic.
“That is so embarrassing,” she said between belly laughs. “Let’s go back and talk about impeachment.”
