Photo: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS ©2018 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.(NEW YORK) — Bill Clinton appeared on Tuesday’s Late Show to promote his book, The President Is Missing, but before he and co-author James Patterson had a chance to talk about it, host Stephen Colbert grilled the president over remarks he made about Monica Lewinsky that were criticized as being tone-deaf, and offered him a “do-over.”
During a Today show interview a day earlier, Clinton appeared angry when asked about Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom he had an affair while serving as president. On Tuesday, he defended his statements by saying, “It wasn’t my finest hour, but the important thing is that was a very painful thing that happened 20 years ago, and I apologized to my family, to Monica Lewinsky and her family, to the American people.”
“I meant it then, I meant it now. I’ve had to live with the consequences every day since, and I still believe this #MeToo movement is long overdue, necessary, and should be supported,” he insisted.
When Colbert questioned Clinton on why he was surprised at the line of questioning, in light of #MeToo, the former president explained, that “it started with and assertion that I had never apologized, as if I had never tried to come to grips with it and as if there had been no attempt to hold me accountable, which anybody who lived through that and knew the facts knew it wasn’t so.”
“Nonetheless,” he continued, “I realize, ‘Hey, there are a lot of people that have, don’t have any memory of that,’ and all they saw was me mad and I seemed to be tone-deaf, to put it mildly.”
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