Former President Barack Obama is getting hammered online after making comments about the Justice Department and political prosecutions during a late-night interview that many conservatives viewed as breathtakingly hypocritical.
Obama appeared Tuesday night on Stephen Colbert’s struggling CBS program, which is preparing to end its run later this month amid declining ratings and growing criticism over the openly partisan nature of modern late-night television. During the interview, Obama warned about the dangers of politicizing the Justice Department and expanding executive branch power. The timing alone was enough to make conservatives spit out their coffee.
“The White House shouldn’t be able to direct the attorney general to go around prosecuting… the president wants to prosecute,” Obama said during the conversation. He added that the attorney general is supposed to represent the American people, not serve as “the president’s consigliere.”
That comment landed online with all the grace of a piano falling off a skyscraper.
Almost immediately, conservatives and Trump supporters flooded social media pointing to the years of investigations, prosecutions, impeachments, and legal battles surrounding President Trump. For many Americans on the right, hearing Obama lecture the country about political prosecutions feels a little like hearing a pyromaniac give a TED Talk on fire safety.
Critics quickly resurfaced the origins of the Russia investigation, which began during the final months of Obama’s administration in 2016. Trump allies have argued for years that the probe unfairly targeted President Trump before he even took office. Add in the FBI surveillance controversy, endless media hysteria, and years of breathless predictions about “the walls closing in,” and conservatives see Obama’s comments as detached from reality at best.
Then came the avalanche of legal cases filed against President Trump after he left office. There was the federal classified documents case, the federal election-related prosecution, Alvin Bragg’s Manhattan case involving business records, and New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil fraud lawsuit. While some cases were delayed, narrowed, or outright dismissed, Trump supporters argue the sheer volume of legal attacks created the appearance of a coordinated political campaign designed to cripple a presidential candidate.
Fox News host Will Cain summed up the conservative reaction perfectly when he mocked Obama’s comments as “rich enough to pucker your face.” Frankly, that may have been the understatement of the week.
What made the interview even stranger was the setting itself. Obama delivered these warnings while chatting with Stephen Colbert, one of the most openly anti-Trump hosts on television. Colbert has spent years turning his program into what often resembles a nightly therapy session for Democrats still emotionally recovering from President Trump existing.
At one point the interview drifted into jokes about aliens, because apparently modern political interviews now operate like a college dorm room conversation at 2 a.m. But once the discussion returned to politics, Obama doubled down.
“We can’t overcome the politicization of our justice system,” he warned.
That statement may actually be true. The problem for Democrats is that millions of Americans believe that politicization already happened, and they watched it unfold in real time over the past several years.
For many Trump supporters, Obama’s remarks did not sound like wisdom. They sounded like revisionist history with a studio audience laughing in the background.
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