Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw complained about the “show on both sides” at the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearing of President Donald Trump on Monday, and said he sympathized with people who may be tuning it out: “I can see why American voters’ eyes glaze over.”
Speaking with host Stephen Colbert, Brokaw appeared on The Late Show to talk about his new book on a timely topic, the impeachment investigation and eventual resignation of [President] Richard Nixon.
“Take me back to what it was like in 1973 to be at the White House,” Colbert asked of Brokaw, whose first reporting job in Washington was covering the Nixon White House. “How much was there a sense that Nixon wasn’t going to last? Because he’s got one more yeart at that point.”
“We knew he was very close to it,” Brokaw recalled. “You know, we had the famous 18-minute tape, for example. Why was it erased? It was erased clumsily because it had stuff on there that was going to make him very liable, what he was saying on the tape that day. We didn’t go on the air saying he was guilty.”
“We worked diligently to prove what we were reporting on a daily basis,” Brokaw added. “Now, as soon as the president says something, as you know from watching the president, or any of the his
As Brokaw began his litany of ‘he’s guilty’s,’ a smiling Colbert proudly raised his hand, eliciting cheers and laughter from his audience.
“You know, if you look at the hearing today,” Brokaw soldiered on past the joke, however, equating the Republicans’ effort to ignore and distract from the facts of Trump’s conduct with the Democrats’ efforts to build a case around it. “I do think you have to keep track of it, but I can also see how it makes the American voters’ eyes glaze over, because it doesn’t seem to be anything but a show on both sides, and I think that’s the really dangerous proposition that we’re dealing with now.”
Watch the video above, via CBS.