John Oliver began, once again, with the latest developments in “Stupid Watergate” on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight.
“With investigators seemingly closing in on multiple fronts, the president this week was apparently worried,” the host said, citing a Washington Post story that reported Trump's concern about the fate of his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. “As one adviser described the president’s thinking,” the piece read, “he does not believe his son purposefully broke the law, but is fearful nonetheless that Trump Jr. inadvertently may have wandered into legal jeopardy.”
“You know what? That seems pretty plausible, to be honest,” Oliver said. “On the long list of things Don Jr. is likely to wander into, legal jeopardy is right up there with the women’s dressing room and a screen door.”
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Of course, President Trump has already deemed the story “fake news” in a tweet this weekend in which he also admitted that his high-level campaign operatives met with Russians in the summer of 2016 “to get information on an opponent.”
“There is so much wrong there,” Oliver said the of president’s Twitter outburst. “From the fact that it undermines the excuse he supposedly dictated that this meeting was about Russian adoptions to claiming he didn’t know about it, and if he did nothing happened and if it wasn’t he didn’t know about it.”
“But perhaps the most galling lie in there is describing Donald Jr. as a ‘wonderful son,’” he continued. “That is just flagrantly false! He’s barely even the most wonderful Donald Trump.”
From there, Oliver moved on to the trial of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, “a man who could be convicted of every crime on earth and still not be as guilty as he looks.”
The host also pushed back on arguments from Trump-supporting pundits like Sean Hannity, who have repeatedly claimed that Manafort’s alleged crimes have “nothing to do” with Trump or Russia.
“That’s true, on its surface,” he said. “But this case is also not exactly not about the 2016 campaign either. Because just think about it, the president’s campaign manager allegedly received millions of dollars in illicit payments from thuggish Kremlin puppets and despite all the money he saved by not paying taxes, had reportedly gone broke supporting his crippling addiction to bad jackets.”
“Yet for some reason, he agreed to work for Trump for free,” Oliver continued. “And look, who knows why he did that? I mean, you probably do and I probably do. And anyone briefed on the broad strokes of this situation in the vaguest possible terms probably does. But no one, besides basically anyone, can say for sure.”
