02/23/25: The Justice Department, CFPB, John Oliver
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What is the tripwire, in your view, that would signal that the country is in serious trouble? Well, I think we're already there.

Most people have never heard of the Consumer Bureau, CFPB. Why were you targeted? Well, that's what's so suspicious right now. The companies that the CFPB oversees are actually some of the biggest and most powerful. Like what? The biggest Wall Street banks, the biggest credit card companies.

the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley who are increasingly lurching in to banking and finance. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. This past summer, we went with John Oliver to Edinburgh, Scotland. As you can see, this is controlled mayhem. Which hosts the world's largest performing arts festival.

And where, as a young comedian... This room was, in many ways, my comedic Waterloo. He tried his hand at stand-up. And I remember walking off stage thinking, oh boy, I want to do that again, right now. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes.

Start fresh in the new year. As you set resolutions for 2024, consider how learning a new language can enrich your life, whether through travel, career advancement, or cultural appreciation. Keeping in mind everything you've learned over the last year, it's time to build on that. And learning a new language can help you connect with others and explore new cultures. With that in mind, there's no better tool than Rosetta Stone.

The most trusted language learning program. Available on desktop and mobile, Rosetta Stone immerses you in the language so you truly learn to think, speak, and understand it naturally. With Rosetta Stone's intuitive approach, there are no English translations. You're fully immersed. And the built-in True Accent feature acts like a personal accent coach, giving you real-time feedback to make sure you sound just right.

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Start fresh in the new year. As you set resolutions for 2024, consider how learning a new language can enrich your life, whether through travel, career advancement, or cultural appreciation. Keeping in mind everything you've learned over the last year, it's time to build on that. And learning a new language can help you connect with others and explore new cultures. With that in mind, there's no better tool than Rosetta Stone.

The most trusted language learning program. Available on desktop and mobile, Rosetta Stone immerses you in the language so you truly learn to think, speak, and understand it naturally. With Rosetta Stone's intuitive approach, there are no English translations. You're fully immersed. And the built-in True Accent feature acts like a personal accent coach, giving you real-time feedback to make sure you sound just right.

Don't put off learning that language. There's no better time than right now to get started. Start the new year off with a resolution you can reach. Today, listeners can take advantage of this Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. Visit rosettastone.com slash rs10. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com slash rs10 today.

The U.S. Department of Justice is reeling tonight from firings and resignations in the first weeks of the Trump administration. One senior leader describes a workplace of confusion and fear. The Justice Department wields enormous power through the FBI and federal prosecutors. It is critical to crime fighting and national security.

But even more, the Justice Department is where Americans look for the rule of law. President Trump has been a target of its investigations during the Biden administration. Now Trump says his administration is cleaning up a Justice Department corrupted by politics. Fear has silenced many in the department. But two prosecutors we met chose to speak up. The Justice Department is under attack.

They're coming after the people that want to uphold the laws that exist. And that should be terrifying to everyone. Sarah Levine and Sean Brennan were federal prosecutors on the Justice Department's biggest investigation, the attack on the Capitol, until they were fired by the Trump administration January 31st. Why were you fired? Because I did my job.

I mean, it's really that simple. I went in, I followed the facts, I followed the law, and I got fired because I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I think we know what we did was right. No regrets. Absolutely none. What we did was justice. Justice for 140 police officers wounded January 6, 2021.

Levine and Brennan were hired about a year and a half ago to prosecute cases from the riot. And in how many of your cases was the defendant acquitted? None. None. Which tells you what? The evidence was overwhelming. Overwhelming, but last month, the president pardoned even the most violent convicts, whom he calls by another name. So this is January 6th.

These are the hostages, approximately 1,500 for a pardon. Not long after the ink was dry, letters of termination hit the Justice Department. The letters rewrote history, calling the prosecution itself, in the words of the president, a grave national injustice. Anyone who has...

watched videos of what happened on January 6th. Knows that the grave national injustice was not the decision to prosecute the rioters. The grave national injustice has been the Department of Justice turning its back on those law enforcement officers, those members of Congress, and all of those victims who were affected. This was a decision to protect people who had committed serious crimes

because they were doing so in support of the president's reelection. To understand the Department of Justice, we went to one who knows it well. Peter Keisler served Republican presidents and was himself head of the Justice Department in 2007 as acting Attorney General for George Bush.

I don't think anybody believes that these people would have been pardoned if they had engaged in exactly the same acts but had stormed the Capitol, say, in opposition to the president and his policies. What message does the president's pardon send? It says that you can commit some very serious crimes.

But if you do so as an identifiable supporter of the president's agenda and political interests, you may be able to get off. And I think it was designed to send that message. A message that also hit the FBI,

Trump's acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, demanded the names of about 5,000 FBI personnel who had tracked down the Capitol rioters in 50 states. He has encouraged agents to inform on one another, and he directed the firing of eight of the FBI's top executives, saying in part,

I do not believe that the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the president's agenda faithfully. Is that the job of the FBI? To implement the president's agenda? No, I mean the president obviously has the prerogative to set the overall policies of the administration. But both the FBI and the larger Justice Department of which it's a part of

owe their duty to the law. But someone might say, "Isn't this what always happens? A new president comes in, the former people are wiped out, and new people are appointed." Not at all. This is really unprecedented, and it's important to understand why. Political appointees get removed and replaced by presidents all the time. This is the top layer of leadership. But beneath them, and the core of the government,

are the civil service. These are people who have developed expertise over often decades of experience working across administrations of both parties and whose jobs are protected by civil service laws that have been on the books since the late 19th century.

Trump's new leader of the Justice Department is Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Attorney General of Florida. Senator, I think that is... She is a Trump loyalist who says that the Justice Department's prosecutions of the president were motivated by politics. They targeted Donald Trump. They went after him. Actually, starting back in 2016, they targeted his campaign. They have launched countless investigations against him.

That will not be the case if I am Attorney General. I will not politicize that office. I will not target people simply because of their political affiliation. Justice will be administered even handedly throughout this country.

Bondi and Bove declined our request for interviews. If confirmed, I will fight every day to restore confidence and integrity to the Department of Justice and each of its components. The partisanship, the weaponization will be gone. America will have one tier of justice for all.

Having said that, Bondi launched a review to scrutinize those in the Justice Department who were involved in prosecutions of Donald Trump, including his indictment in the 2020 election case and his indictment for allegedly hiding classified documents in his home. I don't think anyone who's been watching the last four weeks

could say they are taking politics out of the law enforcement process. Quite the contrary. They are engaging in the very politicization and weaponization that they claim to be trying to eliminate. Peter Keisler, former acting Attorney General, was a Republican until Trump's first term, when Keisler switched to independent. Some people watching this interview say,

You were always against the president. Of course you're saying these things. Well, it's true that I've never voted for Donald Trump. My concern about the use of law enforcement to achieve political ends, that's among the reasons I've never voted for President Trump. But at the end of the day, people can support whatever candidate they want. I would hope that

Nearly everybody would agree as a basic matter that our criminal justice system shouldn't be used as a tool of politics to reward friends and punish personal enemies. That appearance of rewarding friends has triggered the biggest rupture so far. It involves a bribery indictment against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams, a charge Adams denies.

Though he's a Democrat, Adams agreed to help Trump's deportation effort. This month, Emil Bove ordered New York prosecutors to drop the bribery prosecution of Adams, in part so that Adams could devote full attention to illegal immigration and violent crime.

The directive to drop the charges against Mayor Adams was one of the most nakedly political documents out of the Justice Department I've ever seen. If Mayor Adams had instead been an opponent of the president's immigration agenda, then he would have been prosecuted. But because he says he wants to help advance the president's immigration agenda, he doesn't get prosecuted.

Bove's order triggered a revolt. Danielle Sassoon, the top prosecutor in Manhattan, resigned. She refused to sign a motion to dismiss the case because it was, in her words, for no other reason than to influence Adams' mayoral decision-making.

Bove shot back, criticizing the case, writing, "You have also strained, unsuccessfully, to suggest that some kind of quid pro quo arises from my directive. This is false." But a second Manhattan prosecutor quit, telling Bove he would have to find someone who is "enough of a fool or enough of a coward" to sign the motion.

Bove ordered prosecutors in Washington to sign, and there, six more resigned, for a total of eight. And how seriously should the public take those resignations? Oh, it's a flashing red light. Nobody gives up these jobs easily, but people...

have resigned because they are being otherwise commanded to perform unethical acts that they think are contrary to their responsibilities. Looking ahead, what is the tripwire in your view that would signal that the country is in serious trouble? Well, I think we're already there. I think when you have a major political corruption

prosecution dismissed because somebody has agreed to become a political ally of the president, you know, that trip wire has already been tripped. This past week, Emil Bove explained his motion to dismiss to a federal judge. There is no decision yet. The yeas are 51. Last Thursday, by the thinnest of margins, the Senate confirmed Trump's new director of the FBI, Kash Patel,

In a message to the bureau, Patel said his commitment is to justice and the rule of law. He's a former prosecutor who is dedicated to Trump. Patel has written children's books featuring a King Donald who is protected by a wizard named Cash.

Right now, we're really in a place where we're teetering on the edge. For former prosecutors Sarah Levine and Sean Brennan, speaking publicly was not an easy decision. But in the end, they believe silence may be the greatest threat to justice. I don't think I could live with myself if I didn't at least try to help people understand why

what we've seen happening in the Department of Justice over the past few weeks is so critical and why it not only puts all Americans individually at risk, it really puts our constitutional governmental structure at risk. The thing is, as prosecutors, we have an ethical obligation that's higher than any other attorney because what a prosecutor can do

is we can take away somebody's liberty. And what they're doing is they're driving out people that are willing to follow the law. And that's terrifying because our democracy falls apart if there's not some sort of law and order that goes along with it.

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In his role overseeing the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOJ, Elon Musk posted on X yesterday an order to all federal workers to report what they got done last week. Failure to do so would be taken as a resignation.

This bombshell was dropped as teams of Doge workers continue to zero in on one agency after the next—the IRS, Social Security Administration, and others that store your personal information.

One agency the president wants to expunge is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, created to shield Americans from financial fraud and shady lending practices. A Doge team was given wide access to the bureau's computers. What are they looking for? Are they downloading files? Deleting them? We don't know.

Rohit Chopra was the director of the CFPB until February 1st, when he was fired by President Trump. It was the first salvo against the bureau. Most people have never heard of the CFPB. Why were you targeted? Well, that's what's so suspicious right now.

It's a pretty small agency. But here's what's interesting. The companies that the CFPB oversees are actually some of the biggest and most powerful. Like what? The biggest Wall Street banks, the biggest credit card companies, the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley who are increasingly lurching in to banking and finance.

And these companies don't like it. Well, why would they? Right. They would want a situation where the agency is a lapdog rather than a watchdog. The Watchdog Bureau, created by Congress, was the brainchild of Senator Elizabeth Warren. After the 2008 financial crash and the big bank bailout,

Congress created the CFPB to protect people from getting swindled. She's now leading the uphill fight to keep the Bureau alive. For every person who wants to buy a home without getting scammed,

This fight is your fight for every student who wants to borrow money to go to school without getting defrauded, for every member of our military who doesn't want to get trapped by some sleazy payday lender. Say it with me. This is your fight. Oh, and for every American who doesn't want some weird Elon Musk suck up,

searching through your personal private data, this is your fight. Pocahontas. Pocahontas, the fake...

The faker. With Senator Warren's connection, the president and conservatives in general dismissed the agency as a seat of woke radicalism. It was a bad group of people running it. That was a vicious group of people. They really destroyed a lot of people. And you can confirm your goal is to have it totally eliminated, the agency? I would say, yeah.

Because we're trying to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. Getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse is a job the president handed to Elon Musk and Doge. But eliminating an agency that regulates tech companies creates a potential for conflicts of interest for Musk, especially given the secrecy of the project. I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization.

And then you can see, am I doing something that benefits one of my companies or not? It's totally obvious. If there's one thing the Doge operation is not, it's obvious or transparent. Take the small team that was given access to the Bureau's computers.

These are rare, verified pictures of three team members entering the building on Friday, February 7th. We heard from our colleagues that they are camped out in the basement. They've got papers up on the windows to keep people from looking in. And they've been accessing data, certainly. Hannah Hickman was an attorney here until a week and a half ago. Who are these people? Software engineers, college dropouts, certainly nobody was... College dropouts? That's what we've heard. I think...

If there was transparency, people might feel more confident about what's happening. Three hours after they swept in, Elon Musk posted this on X. CFPB RIP. Rest in peace. That day, President Trump appointed Russell Vogt, an ardent critic of the bureau, as its acting director. And he announced on X he would stop funding the agency. The spigot is now being turned off.

Then he sent employees an email telling them to cease all their work. The building was locked. Soon the firing started. Hannah Hickman and nearly 200 of her colleagues found out through a mass email. We virtually shut down the out-of-control CFPB, escorting radical left bureaucrats out of the building and locking the doors behind them.

Meanwhile, inside, behind the locked doors, the team of young men were holed up in the basement, rarely leaving, except, reportedly, to pick up a lunch order from Chipotle. According to several sources, they were granted unprecedented access to the CFPB data systems, including to sensitive bank records.

access that requires training and background checks. Were you vetted? Of course.

How are you vetted? Every employee at the Bureau has to go through a background check before we're hired. It includes a detailed run of our background, fingerprints, talking to neighbors and friends to make sure we are who we say we are. It's a process that takes at least a couple of months before you're hired. The CFPB's chief operating officer gave a sworn declaration saying the young workers were provided privacy and cybersecurity training and signed an

NDA. But in response, the chief technologist who just resigned wrote, those trainings alone would not be sufficient. And there's no mention of Doge employees undergoing a background investigation. I'm worried about

your account number, your social security number being out there. Laura Leigh Salas and Eric Halpern are the highest ranking civil servants to leave the Bureau. After they were placed on administrative leave, both resigned. Eric Halpern was in charge of all the Bureau's lawsuits on behalf of defrauded consumers. Both say they're horrified by the idea of people rummaging through the Bureau's confidential files.

So we do have information, both proprietary business information, trade secret information, and personal identifiable information for consumers that we collected in the course of our work that was necessary to do our work. If you're a company, you want that information to stay private and to stay confidential.

Laura Ley Salas ran a team of nearly 600 inspectors who examined the books of banks and other financial institutions. I think that companies that gave us their financial information and even trade secrets, they will probably be harmed if that information fell into the hands of competitors. So to give you an example, in the last few years, companies have begun using artificial intelligence

to create models that then make decisions about whether you get a loan or not. And that's in the computer? It's in our systems. The algorithms are in the system. Yeah. So what the computers have, in some cases, are the secret sauce that a competitor could gain a lot from knowing. That is true. I'm sure that American companies, when they begin to think about this... They will not be pleased.

In recent years, the Bureau started aggressively policing digital banking companies and products. This is potentially relevant to Elon Musk because he announced that he's starting a new digital payment platform, XMoney.

Does Elon Musk stand to gain something from these files? Absolutely. His company X is moving into the digital payment space, and so he's potentially able to gain access to files of his competitors like Venmo and Cash App. He is able to take out the regulator that would have been the watchdog for his company. You know, I guess it's easier to fire us than it is to beat us in court.

A senior White House official told us that Elon Musk is not in the inner workings of the Doge operation at CFPB. The young men take their orders from the acting director of the bureau. When we asked what specifically they were doing, the answer was, "No comment." Should this agency even exist?

No, we didn't need it. No? No, we didn't need another federal agency in the first place. Norbert Michel of the libertarian Cato Institute agrees with the president that there are too many financial regulatory agencies. If you look at any large financial institution in the United States, you have roughly 12 federal regulators that can come in and examine it. Why do we need that?

Consumer protection existed long before we had a CFPB, and if we got rid of it and put everything back to the way that it was, we would still have consumer protection. But this grew out of the 2008 financial crisis,

when people felt that consumers weren't being protected. Banks were protected, but the little people weren't. If they abolished this consumer bureau, where would the functions go? Well, the most sensible thing to do then would probably be put them all at the Federal Trade Commission, because that is the main federal consumer protection agency. Their motto is literally on the website: "Protecting America's Consumers."

The Bureau has recovered over $20 billion for consumers. But late last week, its dismantling, its disappearing act was there for all to see as workers took down the building's signage. A federal judge imposed a temporary restraining order to stop budget cuts at the Bureau and any more firings. A hearing is set for March 3rd.

The order does not cover those already fired, like Hannah Hickman. No severance? No. Under the normal

regulations governing a government layoff. We should receive at least 60 days notice. Severance, benefits to help us transition into a new role. It's shocking. There are protections for civil servants. Do you have any recourse? I hope so. And our union is fighting back already. We are looking for all legal avenues to pursue this. At the end of the day, the administration thinks they can get away with it because they don't think we have any recourse. So I'm hoping to prove them wrong.

As of now, CFPB investigations and nearly all lawsuits are frozen, and former director Rohit Chopra says no refund checks to defrauded consumers are going out. Right now, would you say that the Bureau exists? I have no idea right now. All I know is that a lot of employees are being told to stay silent and stay home.

Key question: Where's Congress? Well, Congress is the one who makes the laws. You can't just say we're going to pass these laws to protect consumers and then act like the agency is a dead fish. That's not how the Constitution works. Can't the president shut down an agency in the executive branch because, I don't know, he thinks it's redundant, thinks it costs too much money, whatever reason? Generally speaking,

Agencies are established by laws, and eliminating an agency is also done through Congress. All I can say is that the uncertainty around this is a huge signal to the industry that maybe they can get away with cheating people.

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that turn grocery aisles into runways, and all the styles that show off the many sides of you, from daydreamer to multitasker and everything in between, because you do it all in really great shoes. Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or DSW.com. At 47 years old, comedian John Oliver has won 21 Emmy Awards, three Peabody's, and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People.

He's earned the accolades for his unique brand of meticulously researched political humor. His Sunday night show, Last Week Tonight, is now in its 12th season on HBO, giving him a perch to unleash searing satirical takes on America, his adopted homeland. So how did a British-born, middle-class grade school cut-up become one of this country's sharpest comedians? We traveled near and far to find out.

This past summer, we returned with John Oliver to his comedic launching pad, Edinburgh, Scotland, where modern life is set against a medieval backdrop. So tell me about this place. Well, as you can see, this is controlled mayhem. Every August, the city hosts the world's largest performing arts festival, a month-long free-for-all known as The Fringe.

Artists from 60 countries perform nearly 4,000 shows. No act is turned away. Some of it will be great. Some of it will be otherworldly bad. But the fact that the two can exist concurrently is kind of the point. The Fringe is a magnet for comedians. As a 20-year-old studying English at Cambridge University, John Oliver felt the pull. He went and tried his hand at stand-up.

And I remember walking off stage thinking, "Oh boy, I want to do that again right now." Almost sounds like it's addictive. Oh, I think absolutely addictive. He came back year after year and headed to the Royal Mile, a picturesque cobblestone street that turns into a competitive marketplace for attention. Sketch comedy from New York, baby! Were you doing this? I was absolutely doing this.

When you're first coming up here, the only way to do it is to almost beg for people to come and see you. It's John Oliver! He doesn't have to beg people anymore. He was welcomed with open arms at this basement club where he cut his comedic teeth. I want you to know that I've befouled this stage so many times before, there's no guarantee this will go well. He told us he learns from his mistakes, and starting out, he made a lot of them.

It's the best place. But nowhere worse than at this tiny 55-seat venue called Pleasance Below. This room was in many ways my comedic Waterloo. Did you fill all the seats? All of this was empty apart from those four seats. And I thought, fine, that's fine. I can do an hour to four people. And that was my intention, going in. But his plans went awry. About ten minutes in, two people walked out. Then a third.

leaving one woman alone. I saw her hand slowly move down to her bag and I said to her, "Are you leaving?" And she said, "Yeah, yeah, I think I'm going to." Got up, walked out, and it's just me and a sound technician in the room. And he said, "Do you want to keep going?" I said, "No, I think we're done here." And also when you say, "Do you want to keep going?" Do you mean this show or this career? Certainly it feels like I've got some decisions to make.

he decided to stop going for the easy laughs. When I started off, I just wanted to make people laugh. Then I wanted to make people laugh about things I cared about. And for me, that was politics in its broadest form. Did it feel like a risk at the time? It felt like a risk worth taking. And it worked.

On his weekly HBO show, taped in New York City, his unique take on politics and intrinsic problems is what sets him apart from just about every other comedian on TV. Because it looks to me like you are striking out looking right now. He delights in revealing the absurdity in the obscure.

always, we noticed, with a twinkle in his eye and a mischievous smile. Our main story tonight is the threat of nuclear annihilation. You tackle topics, hospice care, bail reform, organ donations. It's not your typical comedy fair. No. I know those don't sound funny. It's because fundamentally they're not. But there are funny things about

how entrenched some of those problems are. And sometimes I think comedy is the best, most illuminating way to talk about them. John Oliver has been making people laugh since he was a kid in the suburbs of Birmingham, England. His dad was a school principal, his mom a music teacher. Young John excelled as the class clown. Later, as a young comedian, he couldn't get enough of the daily shows.

So in 2006, he sent a sample of his work and was called in to try out. This is the audition tape. On Oliver's first trip to New York, he riffed with Jon Stewart about the time Vice President Dick Cheney shot and injured a friend on a quail hunt. I'm sure right now those birds are laughing maniacally at us in one of those little coveys of theirs. I don't...

I don't think birds can laugh, John. Whatever it is that they do, do. Warble, tweet, coo. They're cooing at us right now, John. He was hired on the spot and over the next seven years showed his range.

Absolute pleasure to be here, John. In 2013, Jon Stewart stepped away to direct a movie. I hope all of you have a wonderful, safe summer. Please enjoy the show. And tapped John Oliver to step in. I don't care what they say, it's my show now and I want it in pink. Was that...

Kind of like taking daddy's car for a joyride. Oh yeah. That very first day, the Edward Snowden news broke. And it was really fun to sit behind the steering wheel and think, "Oh, how fast does this thing go?" Or pretty quick, it turns out. His turn at the desk caught the eye of HBO, which gave him carte blanche to create his own show.

He asked Tim Carvell, head writer at The Daily Show, and comedy producer Liz Stanton to join him. They were given the 11 o'clock slot on Sunday nights.

Did that seem like a gift or like they were hiding you someplace? No, I mean, we were on after Game of Thrones. Like, it was more of a sense of, oh, we're going to let some people down. But it's his takedowns that seem to delight him the most.

Because Thomas is now at the heart of the... He pounced on news reports that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had not disclosed lavish gifts from rich friends and a generous deal on his prized motor coach. Look at this beauty, Clarence! He offered Thomas a new motor coach, plus $1 million a year out of his own pocket. Just sign this... If Thomas would resign from the Supreme Court. This is not a joke!

Thomas' lawyer says the justice met the terms of the RV agreement and any other omissions were strictly inadvertent. You seem to have few limits on how far you'll go to get a laugh. With Clarence Thomas, the main point with that was saying that there are not enough guardrails on people giving the money. I can prove that to you by offering this guy a million dollars a year to get the **** off the Supreme Court.

That should be a crime. The very fact that it isn't is a problem. And that felt like the most visceral way to prove that fact.

Facts are fundamental to Oliver's humor. We filed a Freedom of Information Act request. His deep dives into serious topics are painstakingly crafted. The death penalty. I've seen your show described as satirical journalism, investigative comedy. How would you describe it? In general, it is just a rigorously researched comedy show.

both because we want it to be right and for self-preservation purposes. We don't want to be sued into oblivion. Oliver's staff of 83 includes former journalists as well as comedy writers. They churn out 30 shows a year. It starts with this, hundreds of pages of research on each main story.

This one out. Oliver, Carvel and the writers turn those into outlines and then a script, which is tested at a table read. I do not want to see a headline tomorrow that says, John Oliver blasts expensive detention counts. On taping day, we watch them rehearse. But there are much more humane ways to do that. Make last minute changes and get sign off from the lawyers. Finally, it's showtime. Welcome, welcome.

There's a little bit of bated breath when he says the tonight's story is You know, they've been waiting for maybe a year to come to show yeah, they're getting a real dark Like you've lined up in the cold you've maybe taken a flight and you've being told the main stories organ donations And this is my trip to New York. Yeah Have a nice dinner

To balance things out, Oliver likes to close the show with something zany. We did it! The productions are Stanton's department. I try and do, to my best ability, anything we can do to make something happen just because we love the dumb. The dumb stuff is stuff we all love to do. Some of the segments are pretty elaborate. Yeah. This is bad, and we're about to count to slacker. Cause it's way too easy.

They can't be cheap. -We don't talk about that. -We don't talk about that. They'll never find out how much any of it costs. We're cheaper than dragons. As far as we're concerned, that's the financial bar. Oliver has devoted fans and passionate critics. He takes aim at both sides of the aisle. Biden's immigration policies, as we've discussed multiple times before, have been haphazard at best. Last season, you told your viewers

Do not vote for Donald Trump. Absolutely. I'm not going to sit here and say that that is not a partisan thing to do, to say don't vote for Donald Trump. I think it's good advice. But more than...

77 million people voted for Donald Trump. Does your show speak to them? I really hope it speaks to some of them, yes, because most of those main stories that we're talking about are not actually party political. Those are lasting problems that have been there before

the last two or three presidents and may well be there after the next two or three. Home of jails and the… Though he highlights America's shortcomings, he told us he fell in love with this country as soon as he immigrated. He's now a U.S. citizen who fell for an Iraq war veteran. I married someone who's very American, yeah. She was a medic in the U.S. Army.

And now we're married with two American kids. You do love to poke fun at America. Does it trouble you that some people think that criticizing this place means you don't love it? Yeah, I mean, I just think that's utterly absurd. I think you can criticize something because you love it. Because you love it and you want it to get better. He told us in his personal life he's risk-averse.

But when it comes to comedy, John Oliver loves to stir up trouble. So, if you were to look into your crystal ball, what's next? Other than living in the President's gulags in the future, that's what my crystal ball is showing me right now. What's next? I have no idea. Hopefully just more of this. Keep doing what you're doing. Yeah, it's so fun. It's incredibly hard, not infrequently stressful, but it's really, really fun.

As long as America has systemic problems, we'll be there poking fun at them. Now, the last minute of 60 Minutes. Tomorrow is the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. More than 55,000 Ukrainians are dead. Our reporting has shown a mass grave of civilians, a bombed church, a shelled neighborhood.

The U.S. has been Ukraine's decisive ally, sending $100 billion in aid. And in 2023, we asked President Volodymyr Zelensky about that. This is a lot of money. We have a lot of gratitude. What else must Ukraine do for everyone to measure our huge gratitude? We are dying in this war.

Now, President Trump seems to be turning his back, falsely calling Zelensky a dictator and talking peace with Russia, not Ukraine. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.