Donald Trump Jr. is the latest person on President Donald Trump’s team to do something so shocking that it’s no longer possible to dismiss the Russia investigation as fake news. But comedian John Oliver essentially called this four months ago.
On March 5, the host of the HBO comedy show Last Week Tonight started a segment called “Stupid Watergate,” which he described as “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate, but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.”
According to Oliver, every single twist and turn in the ongoing investigation into the Trump team’s ties with Russia has been brought on by a dumb mistake.
And now that Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted out a batch of emails showing that he was aware of and willing to support a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign, Oliver’s claim seems even more accurate.
In the emails, Trump Jr. was offered incriminating information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump.” He accepted the offer and agreed to a meeting with someone described to him in the emails as a “Russian government lawyer” to discuss the information.
As Vox’s Dylan Matthews writes, “Trump Jr.’s behavior was not just wrong. It was staggeringly, astonishingly incompetent. He didn’t just engage in a conspiracy to enlist a foreign government to help win an election, he left written records proving that was what he had done.”
We can only imagine the jokes that Oliver will come up with about this week.
Trump’s team is just bad at covering anything up, according to Oliver
In the past few months, there have been so many bizarre statements from the Trump circle about the investigation that Oliver has run several Stupid Watergate segments.
In one segment, Oliver targeted Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who told senators during his confirmation hearing that he’d had no communications with Russian officials during his time as a Trump campaign surrogate. It was later revealed that he had talked with Russia’s ambassador twice last year. But during the hearing, Sessions wasn’t even asked about whether he had spoken with the Russians — he just offered that information freely.
Here’s what Oliver had to say:
“That was an unforced error. He wasn’t even asked whether he’d met with the Russians. He just implicated himself out of the blue, which should have been immediately suspicious. If you ask someone how their weekend was, and they say, ‘Well, I definitely wasn’t masturbating into the Slurpee machine at the 7-Eleven,’ you check the fucking security cameras at the 7-Eleven, and you don’t act surprised.”
In Oliver’s most recent “Stupid Watergate” segment on May 21, he spent 25 minutes recapping a week of bombshells reports indicating that Trump fired former FBI Director James Comey to try to weaken the investigation into his campaign’s possible ties to Russia.
"It's almost difficult to believe your ears when you hear something so audaciously corrupt,” Oliver said. “It's like if Hillary Clinton sent an email with the subject line, 'Sup, I did Benghazi.'"
Here’s the full video:
This quote from the same broadcast basically sums it all up: “Literally every decision in the Trump administration is the worst possible one. Paper or plastic? Whichever one kills the most birds. Soup or salad? I’m gonna go with the N-word.”
Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait for Oliver’s take on Donald Trump Jr.’s emails until July 30. On Tuesday shortly after his emails were released, Last Week Tonight tweeted that there won’t be a new broadcast this week.
Despite the amount of week happening already this week, there will be no new Last Week Tonight on Sunday.
— Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight) July 11, 2017
