John Oliver on Trump’s DoJ: ‘Potential long-term damage is difficult to sum up’

John Oliver took aim at Donald Trump’s attempts to corrupt the Departmenr of Justice, calling it a once-respected institution that has now been infected by “utter maniacs”.

The Last Week Tonight host spoke about justice and how it’s “both a snatched blinded lady and a pretty good name for a dog above 40lb” before talking about the “absolute fiasco” that has warped the justice department.

He joked about ex-Fox host Jeanine Pirro who has now become the US attorney for the District of Columbia and will be a “future star of the Real Housewives of Hell”.

She was in the news this week after trying to convict an innocent man for vandalising Trump’s reflecting pool and after playing footage of her initial false claims, Oliver joked that “we shouldn’t always have to believe women” adding that she is “dumb as fuck, wrong as shit and louder than a drunk parakeet”.

As the damage was down to a botched installation, Pirro decided not to go through with it but Trump later said she choked and “folded like an umbrella”.

Oliver said he would make a better “sassy upstairs neighbour on a long-running sitcom” than a president dealing with a “slow-moving constitutional crisis”.

He then explained that the justice department was “a massive organisation encompassing everything from the FBI to the DEA to the Bureau of Prisons” but he wanted to focus on the lawyers who litigate its cases.

They have “long been held in high esteem” as they pride themselves on independence, serving the American people not the president.

Yet despite Trump’s earlier attorney general Pam Bondi using her confirmation hearings to claim she wouldn’t politicise the department and would be even-handed, she soon went back on her word.

Just a few weeks in, Bondi accompanied Trump to the Department of Justice and said the department would be working to his directive, with the president calling them a corrupt group of hacks and radicals weaponised against him.

He proceeded to purge officials who had investigated him or his allies and since he returned to office, almost 4,000 have left with only about 1,400 hired to replace them.

Oliver said they have been struggling to recruit people and have now asked for someone with a law degree rather than someone who has worked as an attorney.

He played clips of Bondi being forced to watch footage of a “shrieking lunatic” involved with January 6 and then being asked to confirm that he now works for her.

Priorities have changed to targeting Trump’s enemies such as James Comey, Letitia James and Adam Schiff under his personal instructions.

But these cases have since fallen apart and there has been a “stream of failures” including a problem with securing grand jury indictments.

“In normal times, the DoJ does some incredibly important work but sadly, under Trump, while political prosecutions have risen, other genuinely important ones have either been messed up or tossed aside,” he said.

The justice department shut down 23,000 investigations after Bondi took on the role and the civil rights division has been most affected with the department now aggressively looking into voter fraud, a non-issue that has seen 21 straight losses in court.

The division has also been focusing on cases of university discrimination against white applicants while dropping investigations into police departments.

“A lot of newly hired dipshits are running around pursuing his vendettas while actively undermining work that could actually help people,” he said.

He added that the “potential long-term damage here is difficult to sum up” with a lack of people who “actually value upholding the law” which he said “feels insane having to say that out loud”.

There have been some system guardrails that have helped stop the “utter maniacs” hired by Trump but he added that more work needed to be done.