Seth Meyers Rips Kellyanne Conway for Trying to Criminalize Op-Ed Author

“One of the weirdest aspects of having Donald Trump as president is that every few months or so people working at the highest levels of government have to put down everything they’re doing and hunt the anonymous mole who just called the president a brain-dead moron,” Seth Meyers said Monday night.

The most recent example of this phenomenon, of course, is the now infamous op-ed published in The New York Times by an unnamed senior official in the Trump administration. “Sure enough the government is once again grinding to a halt,” the Late Night host said, “as the president demands that the attorney general use actual law enforcement resources” to investigate who wrote the damning essay.

After playing a clip in which Trump said he wants to uncover the author’s identity, Meyers joked, “He sounds like Sherlock Holmes after a concussion: ‘My dear Watson, we’re going to find out who the suspect is, and where he is and what he did and who he what and why and where.’”

On Sunday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was forced to defend the idea of an investigation into these imaginary crimes during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “I have literally no idea, nor do you, what else this person has divulged,” she said.

“Yeah, we do!” Meyers shot back. “We do because we all read the op-ed. There are no crimes in there. It’s called ‘I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,’ not ‘I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration, And Also I Murdered a Guy.’”

“The fact is,” he continued, “calling Donald Trump an incompetent moron is not a crime—it’s not even new information.”

And yet, as the host said, Trump seems “obviously freaked out” by both the op-ed and Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, threatening via tweet this week that he’ll “write the real book” about his White House.

“Please do that,” Meyers said. “I would love to see you write a book by yourself without a ghostwriter.” He added, “I’ve got to say, I love imagining Trump sitting at a typewriter punching away at the keys with his stubby meat paws. Either he types one finger at a time grandpa-style or with palms fully open like he’s playing Whac-A-Mole.”