Brow Beat

Serious Investigative Journalist Stephen Colbert Goes to Moscow in Search of “the Pee Pee Tape”

When Stephen Colbert’s executive producer approached him in December about a potential trip to Russia, the Late Show host says he wasn’t sure that the journey would be worth it. “No one’s going to be talking about Russia in the summer,” Colbert remembers predicting at the time. How very wrong he was.

On Thursday, Colbert shared what he calls “the whole damn reason” he went to Russia in the first place: He wanted to find evidence that the Steele dossier, a series of leaked memos full of scandalous allegations about Trump’s campaign’s ties to Russia, was real. But Colbert wasn’t interested in the parts about financial ties and collusion—no, Colbert wanted to find the alleged compromising footage the Kremlin took of Trump watching Russian prostitutes urinate on the bed at the presidential suite at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton. In other words, he wanted to find “the pee pee tape.”

With that noble mission in mind, Colbert set out through the streets of Moscow to ask bewildered interview subjects and pedestrians whether they have any leads on “the pee pee tape.” And when those questions yielded nothing, he did what any serious investigative journalist worth his salt would do: He rented the presidential suite for a night, bringing along surveillance expert Andrei Soldatov, to help him look for clues. He didn’t find any, but he definitely had a great time cracking urine puns and jumping on the bed. Maybe the real pee pee tape was the friends we made along the way.