Stephen Colbert: Mystery solved — Trump's the White House leaker

"I've got good news and bad news," Stephen Colbert announced at the top of Monday's Late Show. "The bad news: The Washington Post is reporting that Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. The good news? Trump found the leaker ... That was fast."

Recapping the bullet points of the story, he noted that when Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov were in the Oval Office last week, "Trump apparently went off-script and began describing details about an Islamic State terrorist threat. That is unbelievable. Trump had a script?!?"

The information came from a U.S. ally who had not granted Trump permission to tell the Russians what had learned about an ISIL plot to use laptops as weapons on board civilian aircraft. While presidents are legally empowered to unilaterally declassify any piece of intelligence, doing so with another country's information could very well discourage that nation from sharing information with us in the future.

In fact, because the intel was code-word information, "vital aspects of the (Post) story had to be replaced with other words. For example, Colbert said, "You have to say things like, 'The package has been delivered,' 'The squirrel is in the basket' or 'The idiot is in the Oval.'"

The story broke just as he and other late-night hosts were about to tape their Monday shows, so they didn't have time to delve into the story too deeply. But we'd wager that at this very moment, Colbert and his writers are crafting a rant that will put the "holster" monologue to shame.