John Oliver Calls Trump’s Pardon of Joe Arpaio a ‘Slap in the Face to the Very Rule of Law Itself’

Here’s a clip from last night’s Last Week Tonight, where John Oliver explores the implications of Trump choosing to use his first presidential pardon on so-called “America’s Toughest Sheriff” and early Trump supporter Joe Arpaio from Arizona, who has a long, well-documented history of humiliating and abusing the inmates in his jails and being a law enforcement officer whose “respect for the law seemed awfully selective,” as Oliver puts it, including multiple investigations of “unconstitutional policing” and racial profiling with traffic stops targeting Latinos. Right before he pardoned Arpaio, Trump said he was just “doing his job,” which Oliver responds to with this: “Here’s the thing there: He absolutely was not just ‘doing his job.’ He was also doing something illegal. You wouldn’t say that John Wayne Gacy was just ‘doing his job,’ even though he was, by all accounts, a pretty good birthday clown.”