Between mean tweets, interview pranks and fake trailers, Jimmy Kimmel Live prides itself in creating some of YouTube’s most fantastic late-night content. Yet talk-show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel can get pretty serious sometimes, resulting in the occasional rant about whatever important subject is captivating the nation’s attention at the time. (See: Kimmel on anti-vaxxers.) Or in the case of former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, those stories that… aren’t so popular. That’s because Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison for violating financial laws to pay hush money to one of his former victims. Not victims of fraud, per se, but of sexual molestation.
Needless to say, Kimmel spared nothing when he addressed Hastert during a two-minute chunk of the opening monologue:
“The judge today called him a ‘serial child molester.’ The guy was Speaker of the House. From 1999 to 2007, he was Speaker of the House. During which time he called on lawmakers to “put repeat child molesters in a jail for the rest of their lives.” Today he got 15 months for that.”
Of course, Hastert didn’t get 15 months for several alleged cases of child molestation that were long past the statute of limitations. Instead, he was sentenced to almost a year and a half of jail time for committing financial fraud. Yet the current charges and sentencing stem from what Hastert did as a high-school wrestling coach in the ’60s and ’70s. Hastert apologized in court for the incidents in question, though he did so with a rather ambiguous statement.
Not that the distinction mattered, because Kimmel wasn’t finished:
“He also is the guy who led the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal, presumably because it was consensual sex with an adult woman. I think there should be a rule that anytime a politician pontificates about someone else’s private life, a squad of investigators is immediately sent to his house to investigate what he is up to.”
The host went on to lampoon the 60 people who wrote letters to the judge on behalf of Hastert’s defense, hoping the sentence would be reduced. One of the letter writers was former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who wrote “We all have our flaws, but Dennis Hastert has very few.” As Kimmel put it, “Yeah just one, really. It’s a big one. Other than that, great guy!”