Conan O’Brien’s TBS talk show Conan doesn’t usually get too serious: It’s more likely to talk about toilet jokes with famous people, or the silliness of violent video games, than world politics. Still, when you have access to someone like CNN’s Jake Tapper—a guy whose already high public profile has risen in recent weeks, thanks to his tireless questioning and prodding of Trump mouthpieces like Kellyanne Conway—you might as well go with what you know.
In this case, that’s the recent resignation of former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, whose departure yesterday gave him one of the shortest tenures for a senior White House staff official in recent memory. Flynn’s resignation came about after increasingly strident questions arose about whether he negotiated on sanctions with Russia before Trump’s inauguration—and when Flynn was, thus, just a normal American citizen—and how much he informed Vice-President Mike Pence and the rest of the administration about those talks. Pence claimed that no such discussions of sanctions took place, but Flynn was unable to confirm that information, with the whole thing giving off an overall impression of an ongoing clusterfuck with the country’s national security efforts
For his part, Tapper kept a light touch about what this might mean for the Trump White House. Noting that, “Usually, we get into the ‘What did the president know, and when did he know it?’” bit of a presidency late in the second term, and not four weeks out, Tapper added, “But, y’know, he’s doing things differently.” O’Brien and Tapper then went on to speculate who might fill Flynn’s quickly vacated shoes, suggesting General David Patraeus, General Keith Kellogg, and Vice Admiral Bob Harwood as potential candidates to fill the role, which serves as the chief advisor to the president on national security issues.