As he promised on Monday’s Late Show, Stephen Colbert’s recent trip to Russia included a stay in the Ritz-Carlton presidential suite—“Yes, that one”—where President Donald Trump reportedly spent some time during his previous trips to Moscow. “It’s very nice,” he said. “I wore a hazmat suit.”
“For the past six months, a lot of people have been talking about alleged activities involving Donald Trump and the Ritz-Carlton presidential suite in Moscow,” Colbert said in a teaser for the field piece that aired on Thursday night. “And I’ve been thinking: ‘Why doesn’t somebody just go and look in the room?’ So I did.”
The tour, which he deemed “Ritz Cribz,” included a look at a “beautiful crystal vase depicting, I believe, the allegations in the dossier.” When he pointed out the “powder room,” Colbert noted that the Ritz-Carlton “prefers you use those.” And then there was the personal sauna. “Oh, if this wood could speak,” he said. “Hundreds of the world’s most powerful men have come in here to sweat their balls off.”
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Unsurprisingly, Colbert saved the bedroom for the official broadcast.
“This might be my favorite night of the entire Russia week,” Colbert said from his desk on Thursday’s show. “The piece we’re showing tonight is really the whole damn reason why we went.” He went on to explain that when his executive producer Chris Licht first suggested they go to Russia back in December, he didn’t want to do it. “I was like, no one’s going to be talking about Russia in the summer,” he remembered saying. “I’m a dummy.”
Just yesterday, during the same New York Times interview in which he threw Attorney General Jeff Sessions under the bus, President Trump brought up the infamous dossier that claimed “the Russians had compromising videos of Donald Trump watching prostitutes urinate on a bed in the Moscow Ritz-Carlton presidential suite,” as Colbert put it, and suggested that former FBI Director James Comey was using it as “leverage” against him.
“Now, the wildest accusations in that dossier have never been confirmed,” Colbert said. “But as far as I know, nobody has tried to confirm them.” Those details may be “too salacious” for the mainstream media, he added, “but it’s the only part we care about!” He then started a chant of “pee-pee tape!” with his audience.
“Well, guess what?” he asked. “There was one man brave enough to go to Moscow to check it out.”
When asking random Russians if they knew where the “pee-pee tape” was didn’t work, Colbert sought out Russian surveillance expert Andrei Soldatov, who said he has heard the Kremlin has “something embarrassing about Donald Trump.” With some pressing, he admitted that it may have something to do with a “gold or yellow shower.”
“Join me, won't you? In the bedroom of the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow,” Colbert said once he was in the suite’s bedroom. “The room we have heard so much about, and yet no one has come to check it out, I don't know why. When you are in this room, I just don’t know how to describe it. It’s soaked in history. It just washes over you.”
“You know when you have imagined something for so long, that when you finally see it, it doesn’t match what you pictured in your head?” he asked. “That’s not this feeling at all! This is right on the money.”
Ultimately, Colbert took matters into his own hands, flipped the lights off and shined a black light on the bed. All he found were the words, “Fake news, never happened, sad,” written on the wall in a mysterious fluid.
“Sadder still, I’d come 5,000 miles to find the pee-pee tape, and was leaving with no proof that Donald Trump was ever here,” he concluded.
When Colbert first returned to Russia, he told his viewers that Kremlin intelligence agents followed him “everywhere” while he was there. “It’s important to keep your eye on a comedian while he’s in Russia, doing jokes. I could be giving state secrets to the Russians,” he said at the time. “Oh wait, somebody’s already got that covered…”
