EDIT: Downvotes with no comments. Shocker. Guess it’s hard to back up your opinions, huh? I guess some people are totes fine with war criminals walking free?
What it says on the tin:
Obama told the nation that we “needed to look forward, not backward” when it came to prosecuting war criminals George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
He would end up legalizing and codifying a lot of the worst excesses of the Bush administration.
His actions of letting war criminals walk without any consideration of what they had done literally set the stage for Donald Trump being treated with kid gloves. I don’t see how the two aren’t connected.
Both of them dealt with the question of “Can we successfully prosecute a former President?” Obama kicked the can down the road to ignore the question entirely, because it might appear “partisan” or something.
As evidenced by Trump’s national security documents case, they really wanted to kick the can down the road again. They gave Trump every opportunity to just return the documents with nothing but a slap on the wrist. They only started bringing criminal charges when it became clear that he never had any intent of returning anything.
Obama is viewed so favorably by so many, but it’s hard for me to do so when I think about this. Obama’s unwillingness to address this question in his administration is outright why we are facing the governments inability to reign in Trump at all. He’s done so many things that would have shown regular people the endless inside of a jail cell, but they just let him keep running around free.
When you allow criminals to walk free, other criminals see it as way to get away with whatever they want. That’s pretty much how Trump treated the Presidency, a “get out of jail for fucking everything for free” card. He still views it as such. It’s hard to imagine he didn’t get this idea by watching previous Presidents get away with tons of shit that would see the rest of us behind bars.
Anyway, long story short: Thanks, Obama.
Taking the bait, with Trump’s national security documents case, I’d imagine they didn’t want to Trump to claim Biden’s Justice Department was vindictive (even though he still said it). They gave him several opportunities get out, but he kept doubling down and dug his own grave. As long as the Justice Department answers to the president, anything they do can be seen as politically motivated, especially when a former president of the opposite party is involved.
I agree with that take, but this is an example of an “Oops I won’t do it again I promise” attitude in Washington DC politics in general. The “having documents you’re not supposed to” has happened with a lot of ex-officials, including Democrats, but it’s usually hand-waved away as long as they destroy/return them. I don’t think that is Biden trying to not appear partisan as much as it is Standard Operating Procedure with politicians, and they just didn’t expect an actual all-out criminal to refuse to give them back, like Trump.
I think the many cases of regular officials having classified documents in private residences is a more a sign of a systemic issue of how documents are classified and handled within Washington. Things are classified when they shouldn’t need to be, and sometimes you receive thousands of pages of documents you’re expected to read. With Pence/Biden handling of the classified documents, once they realized they had the documents, they went through the proper channels to disclose this and get them to the National Archives.
Trump did the opposite and it’s clear he showed he knew he had the documents and withheld that information from his lawyers and the National Archives, even going so far as to moving records around to hide where they are. This isn’t a normal situation of accidently having documents, there was clear criminal intent, which Jack Smith’s statements have shown. Treating Trump’s behavior equal to that of Biden or Pence or whoever is disingenuous.
Dealing with a criminal ex-president who is running for reelection has never happened before to the country, so there’s not an operating procedure to follow.
Bush didn’t run for re-election? Reagan didn’t run for re-election? The only criminal President you can say didn’t run for re-election was fucking Nixon.
Literally the point of this post is that we have, time and time again, chosen not to prosecute them, despite plenty of evidence.
Reagan making deals with terrorists in the Iran-Contra affair. Bush signing off on torture, which is a war crime. (We literally prosecuted low level soldiers for torture, but claimed it was just “bad apples” and not a painfully obvious systemic problem. Torture facilities don’t spring up from nothingness without anybody in the chain of command making a choice to torture people. The orders come down from somewhere and when you’re supposed to be the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, sorry, it kind of falls on you.)
It’s been a problem because we keep kicking the fucking can down the road to ignore the question of “can we prosecute a former President.”
So you’re saying the issue is the president’s precedence precedent?