On his HBO show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver criticised what he called the "bizarro-world version of civil rights" being pursued by Donald Trump's Department of Justice. Oliver argued that while high-profile political prosecutions have increased under Trump, more substantive DOJ work has been neglected or mishandled, a shift he says has attracted far less media attention than it deserves.

Oliver pointed out that since Pam Bondi took charge, the department has closed more than 23,000 investigations covering terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offences. He also mocked comments from Harmeet Dhillon, the new head of the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, who described lying about pronouns, colleagues' qualifications and reactions to late-night comedy as major social justice concerns, and cited the division's voting fraud cases, in which it has lost all 21 attempts.