John Oliver Shreds Fox’s Maria Bartiromo For Peddling Trump Election Lies: ‘Even Dumber Than You Think’
John Oliver mocked the steady stream of misinformation about voter fraud pushed by right-wing organizations and turned to one media personality for giving it airtime.
During Sunday’s show, Oliver mocked Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo for a segment aired in August in which she raised the alarm over “immigrants at these DMV offices” who were — according to a friend of a friend’s wife — illegally registering to vote, even though people who are not legal citizens of the United States are not legally allowed to vote. Bartiromo’s claim was widely debunked, and easily debunked because the Weatherford, Texas DMV cited in her tweet doesn’t exist. (There is a Department of Public Safety office that issues drivers licenses, but it is not a DMV and does not register anyone to vote.)
Oliver played the clip before offering his critique:
Bartiromo (from Fox Business clip): What about all these immigrants at these DMV offices where people are going to try to go get a license? They can’t get an appointment at the DMV because it’s jam-packed with illegals. The person that spoke to me about this this weekend, identified several places in Texas where you couldn’t get in. The first one was in Weatherford. A massive line of immigrants getting licenses, they had a tent and a table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote. It was all, the signs were in Spanish. It was an obvious Democrat operation on this voting, he said.
Oliver: Okay, we’ll get into why that is nonsense in a second, but I’m genuinely curious about the person who saw a massive line at the DMV and their instinct was “This must be illegals registering to vote,” and not the DMV functioning like it has since the dawn of time. Do they blame all common inconveniences on immigration? “Oh shit! I burned my mouth on this coffee. The illegals must be brewing it extra hot to burn our tongues into silence!”
Oliver continued:
It’s even dumber than you think, as Bartiromo explained, her source was a friend of a friend’s wife, something that didn’t stop her happily regurgitating it on the news. And if you like that, you can find well-sourced stories like it on Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: With Your Drunkest Aunt Sundays at 10 on Fox Business. Unsurprisingly, those claims were quickly debunked. For one thing, Weatherford, Texas doesn’t have a DMV, and in the place that you can get a driver’s license there, the Department of Public Safety, no such tents or tables was set up outside the office all that week.
And even if this had happened, which it didn’t, as the local GOP chair explained: “All voter registrations are uploaded to the Texas Secretary of State’s database to verify applicant’s eligibility to vote, including citizenship.” And not only have there been no recent instances of ineligible individuals attempting to register in that county, there had only been two in the last 15 years. And yet, just two days after Bartiromo spewed that on national TV, Texas AG Ken Paxton announced an investigation into reports that organizations may be illegally registering non-citizens to vote.
Watch the video above via HBO.
