Stephen Colbert Clashes With Fox News Chris Wallace Over Mueller Hearing

Stephen Colbert picked apart former special counsel Robert Mueller’s  congressional hearing with Fox News host Chris Wallace on Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Late Show.”

And things got slightly heated between the pair.

Colbert began by calling out Wallace for describing Mueller’s performance a “disaster for the Democrats ” during the very first break in his testimony.

President Donald Trump repeated Wallace’s assertion on Twitter:

“You said that at 10:07 this morning, an hour and a half into a six-hour series of hearings,” Colbert told Wallace. “So, is Fox News’ motto, ‘We report and decide before the thing’s over?’”

Wallace explained “there was a break in the hearing and we were asked for our reaction” and said Colbert actually echoed his point in his opening monologue. Colbert refuted the suggestion and said he didn’t understand how it was a “disaster.” “Yes, you do,” Wallace fired back.

“No, I promise you. I don’t,” Colbert responded. “It seemed like a well-organized and choreographed recitation of the moral, ethical and criminal failings of the president of the United States.”

Wallace later said Democrats “wanted to have this hearing is, they kept saying, the quote was, ‘People aren’t going to read the book (a reference to Mueller’s report on his Russia investigation), they’ll watch the movie.’ Well, the movie was a snore.” And he claimed Mueller “seemed like a fellow who didn’t quite know what he was about, what was being said.”

Colbert accused Wallace of only giving “performance notes” and not focusing on the actual content of Mueller’s answers. “They only mean something because we’ve become desensitized to the shock of the information that they were laying out for us,” he said.

Wallace later accused Colbert of representing the “anti-Trump tribe.”

“I’m in the ‘don’t lie to prosecutors’ tribe, that’s the tribe I’m in,” Colbert hit back. “I’m in the ‘do not welcome the help of a foreign country to win our election’ tribe. Those are my tribes. What tribe are you in?” 

To which Wallace replied he was in “the journalist tribe.” 

Check out the interview here: