This week on Full Frontal‘s “Our Weekly Constitutional Crisis: What the F**k is it This Time?,” Samantha Bee delves into that minor kerfuffle caused by Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, the man who just happens to be leading the investigation into Russian ties to the president’s campaign. At 6 p.m. on Tuesday, when Bee and her staff had just finished writing Wednesday’s episode of Full Frontal, “our dumb democracy ran into a wall with a bucket on its head again.”
“Thus began the slow-motion clusterfuck of impulsivity and ineptitude that this White House is famous for.” Bee goes through the already legendary story: Trump had his longtime personal bodyguard hand-deliver a letter terminating Comey, “complete with a totally normal digression about how the president didn’t collude with Russia,” to FBI headquarters in Washington — even though Comey was on a work trip in Los Angeles, “where he learned about his firing from a TV report.” You could not make this up.
Then, of course, “Sean Spicer ‘managed the narrative’ by hiding in the bushes so reporters couldn’t film him.” Totally normal behavior from a White House Press Secretary who is totally not trying to aid in his administration’s cover-up. Bee then cuts to a montage of cable news clips in which reporters compared the firing to Nixon’s infamous “Saturday Night Massacre” in October 1973, when the beleaguered president fired the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate break-in.
(Of course, a major difference is that Nixon’s move resulted in the resignation of the attorney general and his deputy; in this case, both Attorney General Jeff Sessions — who vowed to remove himself from any Russia-related investigation after it was revealed that he lied during his confirmation hearing about meeting with the Russian ambassador himself — and his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, agreed to help Trump create a paper trail to explain Comey’s firing. Read all about it in this Washington Post article based on interviews with a whopping 30 sources.)
As if this story weren’t crazy enough, Bee also includes footage of a bizarre interview CBS conducted with a jersey-clad Vladimir Putin in the moments before he was set to play a game of hockey, in which Putin denies Russia’s involvement in the whole scandal and claims, “President Trump is acting in accordance with his competence.”
“We know!” Bee says. “That’s the problem!” Watch: