Stephen Colbert interrupted his own monologue on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show to dive into some late-breaking news: a lawsuit filed by the White House to stop John Bolton from releasing his memoir, The Room Where It Happens.
After focusing the early part of his monologue on President Donald Trump’s police reform executive order (during which the president made no mention of racism, despite weeks of protests), Colbert pulled the curtain back on how and when his show was being taped. “It’s only been a second since that full-frame graphic went up, but it has been a half-an-hour since I said those last words you heard,” Colbert said on Tuesday, before providing a brief summation of the lawsuit filed by the Trump administration against Bolton.
Filed Tuesday, the breach of contract claim alleges that Bolton previously “struck a bargain with the United States as a condition of his employment in one of the most sensitive and important national security positions in the United States Government and now wants to renege on that bargain by unilaterally deciding that the prepublication review process is complete and deciding for himself whether classified information should be made public.”
“Now let me explain what that means: No one knows what that means,” Colbert said of the lawsuit. “Because what’s breach of contract with the government? You can arrest somebody for spreading state secrets, but breach of contract? Breach of contract is, you sue your plumber because he never finished installing your new septic tank, which Trump’s really going to need because this lawsuit is a huge pile of crap.”
Colbert added, “Unlike every other leader in the free world, Trump makes his advisors sign non-disclosure agreements. And the lawsuit charges that Bolton has breached his legal obligations embodied in his NDA. Now, we’ve all heard about Trump’s NDAs. Stormy Daniels had one, and she got out of it. So, Trump should just cut Bolton a check for $130,000—because now, Bolton is going to spank him with this book. Which I think technically makes Bolton a porn star.”
According to his publisher, Simon & Shuster (which was not mentioned in the lawsuit), The Room Where It Happens seeks to expose the chaos inside the Trump White House. Bolton, Simon & Shuster write, argues that the “House committed impeachment malpractice by keeping their prosecution focused narrowly on Ukraine when Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy—and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.”