Stephen Colbert had some fun on Wednesday, devoting almost his entire monologue to the ongoing internecine fighting among Republicans over Jeffrey Epstein. And at one point, he pretended to become completely consumed by conspiracy theorizing, with an elaborate theory of his own to explain the whole thing built in part on a classic song by the Beach Boys.
In case you’re not caught up, Republicans are having a very public fight over the claim made last week by Attorney General Pam Bondi that the so-called “Epstein Files” — the alleged list of clients, and potential blackmail information purportedly kept by Jeffrey Epstein and confiscated when he was arrested in 2019 — don’t actually exist. These never seen documents have been hotly speculated over since his death that same year by an apparent suicide while in prison awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, earlier this year Bondi stated that these documents were very real and very much in her possession and planned to make them public, something a lot of angry Trump supporters have brought up. Trump for his part has been loudly downplaying Epstein’s overall importance, even falsely blaming Democrats for the scandal, and is now attacking his own supporters over the matter.
Making things murkier, the administration released what they claimed was raw footage from Jeffrey Epstein’s prison cell from around the time he killed himself, footage analysts have since confirmed was actually heavily doctored. Now many Trump supporters are furious, even accusing him of covering something up. And that’s on top of the numerous conspiracy theories about Epstein that show no signs of dying down. Naturally Colbert talked about all of this and more.
“Last week to quell the onslaught of demands for more of this information, the FBI released a video of the outside of Epstein’s prison cell, but instead of quashing the conspiracy theories, it just created more, because the FBI admitted the video has a missing minute, which is concerning, okay, but to kill a guy, you’d need like, three times that.”
“By the way, last night, an analysis by Wired revealed this video actually had nearly three minutes cut out, three minutes, three missing minutes. That’s not the kind of thing that calms conspiracy theorists down guys,” Colbert continued, adding, “Guys, don’t worry. Okay? The FBI says there wasn’t a shooter on the grassy knoll, okay, but we have discovered three new Knolls.”
Colbert explained that Wired Magazine “found that the video had been stitched together in Adobe Premiere Pro from two video files,” asking the audience to see if they could identify the clips, at which point he played video that abruptly cut to a parody of Porky Pig from “Looney Tunes” saying “he’s lying!”
“Further analysis showed that one of the source clips was approximately two minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video,” Colbert continued, at this point pretending to dive deep into conspiracy theories.
“So follow me down the rabbit hole. What’s two minutes and 53 seconds long? The song ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys. Where do you find beaches? On islands. Who had a private island when he was alive? Marlon Brando, whose name is an anagram of Almond Baron. What are almonds? Nuts. What’s also nuts? The Jeffrey Epstein scandal. What really? What really happened to Jeffrey Epstein? God only knows.”
Watch the whole monologue below:
