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.
Joe Pera
Todd Barry