Obama needs to shrink back into obscurity. But he refuses to do so.
Now Barack Obama humiliated himself with one moronic statement.
A Colbert Appearance, A Veiled Jab, And An Immediate Blowback
Barack Obama made his latest foray into the political arena on Tuesday with an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — one of the show’s final weeks on the air — and spent a portion of his time delivering what amounted to a barely veiled rebuke of President Trump’s relationship with the Justice Department.
“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 idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer, it’s not the president’s consiglieri.”
He continued: “You can’t have a situation in which whoever’s in charge of the government starts using that to go after the political enemies and reward their friends, right?”
The White House did not let it stand. Spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with characteristic bluntness, calling Obama “a classless moron” suffering from “a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Ingle added: “He is a total disgrace for all the division he has sowed upon this country, and history will not judge him well. The only special interest guiding the Trump Administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people. Only pathetic trainwrecks like Stephen Colbert would waste their time interviewing one of the worst presidents in history on his failing show.”
The Wingman Cometh
The speed with which social media users surfaced the contrary evidence was not surprising. In a 2013 radio interview with Tom Joyner, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder described his own relationship with the 44th president in terms that would seem to undercut the lecture Obama was delivering more than a decade later.
“I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, there’s still work to be done. I’m still the President’s wing-man, so I’m there with my boy. So we’ll see,” Holder said.
Obama acknowledged during the Colbert interview that he consulted with Holder regularly during his tenure, though he characterized those conversations as focused on “broader policy issues” rather than specific prosecutorial decisions. “That’s different than who do you charge, what case do you bring,” he said.
That distinction may be legally and conceptually valid. It is also considerably harder to maintain with a straight face when your attorney general has publicly described himself, in those exact words, as the president’s “wing-man.” Whether Holder’s comment was casual bravado or a genuine description of the relationship is a question Obama left conspicuously unaddressed on the Colbert stage.
Holder’s tenure also included being held in contempt by the House of Representatives for failing to produce documents related to Operation Fast and Furious — a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives operation that led to Mexican drug cartels gaining access to illegal weapons. The political inconvenience of those facts did not appear to temper Obama’s lecture.
The Comey Factor — And Why The Timing Matters
Obama’s remarks arrived as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has indicted former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post featuring a seashell formation spelling “86-47” — shorthand for removing Trump from office — which the Justice Department characterized as a threat against the president’s life. The latest charges followed the dismissal of earlier charges brought against Comey under the previous DOJ leadership. Several other Trump political adversaries, including former national security adviser John Bolton and New York Attorney General Letitia James, have also faced federal charges.
Trump posted to Truth Social in September directly addressing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, listing political opponents he expected to be prosecuted. Obama is correct that presidential direction of specific prosecutions raises genuine rule-of-law questions that deserve serious debate. But a man whose AG called himself the president’s “wing-man” on national radio, and who sat by as that AG was held in congressional contempt, is not the most persuasive messenger for that argument.
