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Seth Meyers rips Sidney Powell, 'the craziest addition to the Trump Cinematic Universe'

Seth Meyers

Three weeks clear of the election and with the formal transition of power finally underway, Seth Meyers looked ahead to calmer news cycles of the future on Monday night. “One thing I’m definitely not going to miss about the Trump era is the Mad-libs style news reporting,” the Late Night host said.

“Another thing I won’t miss is trying to follow the rotating cast of fringe rightwing weirdos who come in and out of the Trump world,” such as the conspiracy-peddling figures on the Trump legal team led by Rudy Giuliani. Last week, the former mayor of New York City held a press conference in Philadelphia peddling lies about voter fraud while dark droplets – seemingly brown hair dye mixed with sweat – dripped from his temples.

“Rudy dyed his hair frantically in a bathroom like Richard Kimball in The Fugitive,” Meyers joked. “I mean, if I saw that coming out of my radiator I would be pounding on my super’s door.”

Giuliani and his team are “the only people Trump has left, because no legitimate lawyer wants to be part of this unhinged assault on American democracy”, Meyers continued, pointing to reports that most of Trump’s legal team has quit. “At this point, the Trump legal team is like CVS at midnight – sure, they’re ‘open,’ but nobody actually works there.”

Meyers zeroed in on one especially fringe figure: Sidney Powell, “by far the craziest addition to the Trump Cinematic Universe,” a lawyer who spent the weekend floating a truly unhinged conspiracy theory that involved Georgia governor and Trump ally Brian Kemp, the CIA, and Venezuela’s deceased president, Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, in a plot against the president.

Related: Stephen Colbert on Trump's 'race between autocracy and incompetence'

“If you thought Rudy was bonkers, this lady is crazier than a cereal mascot,” Meyers said. Her theories sans any evidence spooked even the president’s staunchest allies on Fox News, who pressed her with questions when she promised, as she said on Lou Dobbs’s show, to “release the Kraken”.

“I guess the only Kraken we ended up seeing was in Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye,” Meyers retorted. “They have no evidence, which is why lawyers keep quitting or getting fired or laughed out of court, because this whole thing isn’t actually about evidence. It’s about manufacturing a conspiracy theory that will animate Trump’s base for years to come. It’s just another scam.”

Stephen Colbert

The Late Show taped just after Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration, “ascertained” the election result and initiated the formal transition process to President-elect Joe Biden. “So it is official, our next commander in chief will be President Biden,” said Stephen Colbert. “Which means somewhere right now, Rudy Giuliani is filing a last ditch legal claim that our current president’s legal name has always been Joe Biden.”

In another blow to Trump’s disintegrating attempt to overturn the election results, Georgia officials completed a hand recount of the entire state to confirm that Joe Biden won – “so the president saw the writing on the wall, and graciously…asked Georgia for another recount,” Colbert deadpanned. “He wants them to recount the recount? Mr President, things don’t necessarily get better when you ask for a do-over. Look at Eric.”

Colbert also touched on the president’s attempt to distance himself from Powell, whose conspiracy theories on Trump’s election loss were outrageous enough to merit skepticism from Fox News host and reliable Trump conspiracy peddler Tucker Carlson.

Even Giuliani attempted to distance himself from Powell, releasing a statement claiming “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own” and that she is “not a member of the Trump Legal Team”.

“Yes, she doesn’t work for them at all, it’s just a coincidence that during Giuliani’s two-hour press conference, she was on stage the entire time,” Colbert said, with photo evidence. “It’s a simple mix-up! They invited Sidney Powell but they meant to invite Sidney Powell Total Landscaping.”

Jimmy Kimmel

And in Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel recapped the twentieth day of “Squattergate,” in which “we still haven’t seen the president concede. We’ve barely even seen the president.”

The president once again had no public events on Monday – “just some eating and some private screaming into a MyPillow” on the docket, Kimmel joked – after a weekend of golf.

Still, “I’ve never seen a guy try so hard to keep a job he doesn’t even do,” Kimmel said, as on Friday, Trump “tried to interfere in the election personally” by inviting Michigan’s Senate majority leader and speaker of the House, both Republicans, to the White House for some “bigly buttering up”. The plying didn’t work; on Monday, Michigan’s board of canvassers certified the state’s election result, once again confirming Joe Biden as the nation’s 46th president.

Kimmel also touched on Powell and her fear-mongering that Kemp was bribed by a voting machine company to throw the election to the Biden. “I guess that was too much even for Donald Trump, because a week after he welcomed Sidney Powell to what he described as a ‘truly great legal team,’ the campaign put out a statement saying ‘Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own,’” Kimmel explained.

“It’s a real CrackerJack team of attorneys he put together here, in that he appears to actually have found them in boxes of CrackerJacks.”