John Oliver Tries to Make Sense of Trump’s Watergate Speedrun With Last Week’s Deluge of News
But did he use hacks?
We’ve made tons of (mostly bad) jokes in recent days that political news has been breaking at an absurd and fairly regular pace, mostly with reference to the investigation into the Trump team’s dealings with Russia. That’s why John Oliver is back to covering “Stupid Watergate” this week, Trump’s remarkably Nixionian scandal that almost feels like he’s creating the parallels on purpose at this point.
We’ve written exhaustively (truer words were never spoken) about these news items over the past week, but to summarize: we learned that Trump revealed highly classified information to Russian officials just because he could; a memo written by then-FBI Director James Comey detailed a meeting wherein Trump essentially pressured him to end the FBI’s investigation, with more like it written along the way as a standard FBI way to leave a paper trail; a special counsel was appointed for the Trump/Russia investigation by the Department of Justice; it was reported that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a “person of interest” in the investigation; fired National Security Adviser Mike Flynn ignored a congressional subpoena (and is now expected to invoke the 5th amendment); WaPo had listened to a recording of GOP members of Congress, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, from before the election, talking about Trump being paid by Russia and keeping quiet about it (which they say was a joke, but they still consciously downplayed Russian election interference); Trump told Mike Flynn to “stay strong,” which could be construed as telling him to keep quiet until Trump can get the investigation to go away, and reportedly wants Flynn back at the White House; the Trump team knew that Mike Flynn was under investigation for being a paid lobbyist for Turkey when he was brought aboard, and he delayed a U.S. military operation to the benefit of Turkey; and the White House did not even deny the Friday evening story that Trump told Russian officials that firing Comey would take pressure off of him over the investigation.
And those are just the biggest highlights. Each of those is a multi-faceted story in itself, and that’s why we’re glad to have a show like Last Week Tonight around to parse it all—and some comedy to ease the pain never hurt anyone, either. No matter what you think of all this news and what the truth is at the bottom of the heaps of lies, the lying and obstruction is a major problem all by itself, and the acting FBI Director says the investigation is “highly significant.” This is not a drill, no matter how many Pepe-faced trolls try to claim there’s nothing there.
(image: screengrab)
Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!
—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—
Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com
