DeSantis has broken back onto the scene. And Obama better take notice.
Because Ron DeSantis just smacked Barack Obama with a brutal reality check.
Obama Steps Back Into The Spotlight With A Familiar Sermon
Barack Obama’s post-presidential reinvention appears to involve a recurring role: touring late-night television to warn Americans about the dangers of politicizing the Justice Department. He made his latest appearance on CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and the message was vintage Obama — measured, morally authoritative, and entirely disconnected from the record he left behind.
“The White House shouldn’t be able to direct the attorney general to go around prosecuting whoever the president wants prosecuted,” Obama told Colbert. “The awesome power of the state, you can’t have a situation where whoever is in charge of the government starts using that to go after their political enemies or reward their friends.”
He went further: “We can survive a lot, bad policy, funky elections, there’s a bunch of stuff that we can overcome, we can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system.” He said the attorney general should be “the people’s lawyer and not the president’s consigliere” — and expressed hope for “restoring some sense of the Justice Department being independent in making judgments about specific cases and prosecutions.”
All of this is precisely the kind of measured civic-minded oratory that Obama has always been good at delivering. It is also, given his actual record, an extraordinary thing for him to say with a straight face.
DeSantis Provides The Correct Historical Context
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis waited for Obama to finish his remarks — and then responded on X with seven words that landed harder than any lengthy rebuttal could have.
“The Russia collusion hoax would like a word.”
It is, by any measure, the appropriate response. Under Obama’s watch, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump based on what Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard would later describe as fabricated intelligence. The investigation — which continued for years under Special Counsel Robert Mueller — ultimately concluded that no coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia was established. What it did establish, according to Gabbard’s July 2025 findings, was that Obama and his senior national security team directed the creation of an Intelligence Community Assessment they “knew was false,” which served as the basis for what the ODNI described as “a years-long coup against the duly elected President of the United States.”
Gabbard was explicit: “There is irrefutable evidence detailing how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, as though it were true.”
Critics have disputed Gabbard’s characterization. But the existence of the dispute itself illustrates exactly why Obama occupies an awkward perch when preaching about DOJ independence.
The Holder Problem That Never Goes Away
Obama acknowledged on the Colbert stage that he consulted regularly with Eric Holder, his longtime Attorney General. He was careful to draw a line between broader “policy” conversations and specific prosecutorial direction. “That’s different than who do you charge, what case do you bring,” he said.
It is a distinction that might be more persuasive if Holder had not famously described himself on national radio in 2013 as “still the President’s wing-man.” The remark was casual, but it captured something real about the Obama-Holder relationship — and it made precisely the impression that Obama is now asking Americans to fear from the current administration.
Holder’s tenure also included being held in contempt of Congress for withholding documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, in which ATF-monitored firearms ended up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. The historical record, in other words, is considerably more complicated than Obama’s Colbert appearance implied. DeSantis, in seven words, made that clear. The Obama era’s relationship with the Justice Department is not the clean example of institutional probity that the 44th president is now selling.
