Late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert blasted Fox News and referred to former President Donald Trump as “Putin’s puppet” on Monday night when discussing the recent arrest of some of his show’s team members at the U.S. Capitol.

Colbert explained that his own rubber rottweiler puppet — Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog — had extended invitations to interview members of Congress about the hearings of the January 6 committee. Several Congress members accepted, and so Colbert’s team visited the Capitol to conduct the interviews.

However, last Thursday, U.S. Capitol police arrested Colbert’s team members, thinking that they had intruded.

“[My team was] doing some last-minute puppetry and jokey make-them-ups in a hallway when Triumph and my folks were approached and detained by the Capitol Police, which actually isn’t that surprising,” Colbert said during his Monday night monologue.

“The Capitol Police are much more cautious than they were say 18 months ago and for a very good reason. If you don’t know what that reason is, I know what news network you watch,” he added, knocking Fox News.

He then mentioned that Fox News’ resident white supremacist Tucker Carlson and other conservative pundits had disingenuously accused his team of staging an “insurrection” on the Capitol.

“I am shocked I have to explain the difference but an insurrection involves disrupting the lawful actions of Congress and howling for the blood of elected leaders or to prevent the peaceful transfer of power,” Colbert said. “Now, it’s predictable why these TV talkers are talking like this on the TV. They want to talk about something other than the January 6 hearings on the actual seditious insurrection that led to the deaths of multiple people, the injury of over 140 police officers.”

“But drawing any equivalence between rioters storming our capitol to prevent the counting of electoral ballots, and a cigar-chomping toy dog is a shameful and grotesque insult to the memory of everyone who died and obscenely trivializes the service and the courage the Capitol Police showed on that terrible day,” Colbert added.

Then, he began joking, “Maybe there was a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States with a rubber Rottweiler…. We all know the long history of puppet lawlessness: the Great Muppet Caper, the Fraggle riots of the 1980s.”

“In this case, our puppet was just a puppet doing puppet stuff,” he continued. “Hard to say, so much has changed in Washington that the Capitol police do have to stay on high alert at all times. Because of the attack on January 6, as the hearings prove more clearly every day, the blame for that actual insurrection, all lies with Putin’s puppet.”

The phrase “Putin’s puppet” refers, of course, to Trump. It has long been thought that Trump has been supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin as a way to cause division among Americans and to undermine faith in U.S. Democracy. To this end, Putin’s puppet has been very effective indeed.

On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the first official in the administration of President Donald Trump to blame Russia for a massive and ongoing cybersecurity attack on the U.S. government and private sector companies. Meanwhile, Trump has said little to nothing, continuing his long and suspicious pattern of never criticizing the Russian government.

The attack, conducted by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation (or SVR RF) hit the U.S. Treasury, Commerce, Justice and State Departments, all five branches of the U.S. military, the Pentagon, NASA, the Executive Office of the President and the National Security Agency, as well as the top 10 U.S. telecommunications companies and other “consulting, technology, telecom, and oil and gas companies in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.”

The Russian state hackers accomplished this by slipping through vulnerabilities in the Orion network monitoring software from SolarWinds, a U.S. company offering information technology monitoring and management tools, The Washington Post reports.

“This was a very significant effort, and I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity,” said Pompeo in a Friday interview with “The Mark Levin Show.”

However, Trump has said jack about the attacks while he touts the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine and continues to claim, without any legal evidence whatsoever, that widespread voter fraud caused him to lose the presidential election.

Rather, Trump has claimed that the cyberattack isn’t as bad as the media claims — he made the same accusation about the media’s treatment of coronavirus. He has also said that the attack may have come from China and may have targeted voting machines, even though there’s no evidence of either. These comments are literally all he has said on the matter.

“The problem is there’s not even been condemnation from the top,” Chris Painter, State Department cyber coordinator in the Obama administration said. President Trump hasn’t wanted to say anything bad to Russia, which only encourages them to act irresponsibly across a wide range of activities. [At the very least,] you’d want to make clear to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that this is unacceptable — the scope is unacceptable.”

President Donald Trump kicked off Tuesday by blasting John  Bolton, after numerous articles show his former National Security Advisor questioning the president’s strange allegiance to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In one, Bolton says Trump’s meeting with Putin in Helsinki was the incident that shocked him the most.

That was in 2018, when Trump stood next to the Russian President, told the world that Putin denied “meddling” in the U.S. election, and that Trump beloved Putin – over the U.S. intelligence community.

In response, on Tuesday Trump called Bolton “one of the dumbest people I’ve met in government.” He said Bolton “states often that I respected, and even trusted, Vladimir Putin of Russia more than those in our Intelligence Agencies.” And then tries to deny it is true by making a very odd statement.

“While of course that is not true, if the first people you met from so called American Intelligence were Dirty Cops who have now proven to be sleazebags at the highest level like James Comey, proven liar James Clapper, & perhaps the lowest of them all, Wacko John Brennan who headed the CIA, you could perhaps understand my reluctance to embrace!”

Experts are saying Trump’s attempt to deny the accusations he trusts the President of the Russian Federation more than the U.S. Intelligence Community sounds more like a confirmation than a denial.

Professor of international relations, political scientist and journalist David Rothkopf:

This denial that Trump trusted Putin more than the Intelligence Community sure sounds more like a confirmation that it’s true. Perhaps that is because it is true. (This is just more evidence to that effect.) https://t.co/RSH1YerdDs

— David Rothkopf (@djrothkopf) August 11, 2020

Bloomberg Opinion columnist, author of “TrumpNation” Tim O’Brien:

“The man has very strong control over a country. Now, it’s a very different system and I don’t happen to like the system, but certainly in that system, he’s been a leader. Far more than our president has been a leader.” – Trump on Putin, 9/7/16 https://t.co/uNLDUjBOEP

— Tim O’Brien (@TimOBrien) August 11, 2020

Former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, political commentator, and author David Frum:

Extra insults = extra confirmation of the allegation https://t.co/uwYJsRQShB

— David Frum (@davidfrum) August 11, 2020

National security lawyer Bradley P. Moss:

“So called American intelligence” https://t.co/EnfePpeiSD

— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) August 11, 2020