Former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis had resolved to live-laugh-love her way through indictment proceedings, and she sold the smiliest mugshot merch ever known on this planet. She was displaying neither of these positive moods, however, while submitting her guilty plea for her role in the Trump Campaign’s disastrous “Strike Force” attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Ellis began weeping in open court while claiming to Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee that she had neglected to do “due diligence” by fact-checking the claims made by other Trump attorneys. That detail wasn’t of too much concern to Stephen Colbert, who nailed Ellis shortly after the 4:45 mark in the above video. Instead, Colbert blamed the tears on Rudy Giuliani’s notoriously audible fart, which Ellis definitely noticed when it initially happened during a Michigan hearing.
Colbert is pretty sure that Ellis “especially” regrets “this famous outburst from Rudy Giuliani’s legal briefs.” He added, “We know why she was crying in court. Because her eyes were still burning.”
It was a fart that Rudy put a lot of oomph into, so that makes sense. Ellis even came down with Covid shortly after that incident, so the running joke at the time was that Rudy’s tush did it. It was such a powerful outburst, yes, that it threatened to overshadow the hair dye debacle, but not quite.