John Oliver Checks in on the Mueller Investigation on Last Week Tonight‘s Stupid Watergate II

Last month marked the one-year anniversary of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. To mark the fact that President Trump hasn’t shut down the investigation like he so badly wants to, John Oliver is here to tell us not to count our chickens before they hatch.

In the latest segment about “Stupid Watergate” on Last Week Tonight, a series that Oliver defines as covering a scandal “potentially on the scale of Watergate, but where everyone involved is dumb and terrible and bad at everything,” he calls out Trump and his Fox News friends for actively undermining Mueller’s investigation. The host also suggests that conservative pundits are doing their best to cast any and all doubt on the probe into the Trump administration.

Oliver opens the segment with the troubling news that only about half (54 percent) of Americans support continuing the investigation. The number is down from 62 percent in the earlier days of the investigation, despite the progress the investigation has made, leading to numerous indictments and guilty pleas. As Oliver’s puts it, “if this is a witch hunt, then witches definitely exist.”

Oliver suggests that the conservative media has played a big role in the aforementioned decrease and outlines three tactics that he believes the media outlets are using to convince the “jury” (i.e., the public) that Mueller’s probe should be suspended: redefining the investigation, whataboutism and building a counternarrative. The biggest takeaways from these categories are as follows.