If “I hope you can let Flynn go” is considered obstruction of justice, then we’ve come a long way since the Obama days. Did everyone forget Ferguson so quickly? It happened in 2014 so it wasn’t all that long ago. Did everyone forget about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman? Here are three times (at least) that Hussein Obama really did try to obstruct justice (and got away with it.)
| 3 Times Obama attempted to obstruct justice |
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First, knowing that prosecutors choose which cases to pursue and which not to, even if there technically is criminality, Obama attempted to mitigate the transgression.
“She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy,” Obama told Chris Wallace of Fox News. “What I also know is that there’s classified and then there’s classified. There’s stuff that is really top secret top secret, and then there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you may not want on the transom or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff you can get in open sources.”
Next, he addressed the issue of intent and her loyalty to the country, noting her commitment to service.
“I continue to believe she has not jeopardized America’s national security,” Obama said. “Now what I’ve also said, and she’s acknowledged, is there’s a carelessness in terms of managing emails that she has owned and she has owned and she recognizes. But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective. This is somebody who served her country for four years as Secretary of State and did an outstanding job.”
In August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. Whether Wilson acted justifiably would have to be investigated, but that didn’t stop Obama from repeatedly suggesting how much he cared about Brown and his family, which had to weigh on prosecutors.
A few days after the shooting, Obama expressed empathy for Brown’s family and referred to him affectionally as “this young man”:
The next month, at the Congressional Black Caucus Awards Dinner, Obama said the shooting had “awakened our nation” to the problems between African-Americans and police. So Michael Brown was now some sort of civil rights icon.
The president’s view of the case was clear, but his own Justice Department eventually decided they couldn’t justify pursuing Wilson.
I do not recall Obama ever expressing empathy for Officer Wilson, who was exonerated after the evidence showed he acted in self-defense after Brown tried to take his gun and possibly kill him with it. And while the trauma is no doubt worse for the person on the wrong end of a bullet, Wilson no doubt experienced extraordinary distress at having to kill someone and then be charge in the public arena with doing it out of racism.
In March 2012, after Trayvon Martin, an African-American, was killed by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman, Obama said a few days later that Americans need to do “some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen,” and famously added, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”