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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded with a sharp one-liner after former President Barack Obama criticized the Trump administration for politicizing the Department of Justice.
“The White House shouldn’t be able to direct the attorney general to go around prosecuting whoever the president wants prosecuted,” Obama said during an interview with CBS.
“The awesome power of the state, you can’t have a situation where whoever is in charge of the government starts using that to go after their political enemies or reward their friends,” he continued.
In response, DeSantis wrote on X, “The Russia collusion hoax would like a word.”
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During an interview with CBS’ Stephen Colbert, Obama said that as president, “There were a couple [norms] that I followed, even though they weren’t law.”
“And we’re going to have to do some work to return to this basic norm, and we probably now have to codify it,” he said. “The idea is that the attorney general is the people’s lawyer and not the president’s consigliere.”
Obama said the politicization of the DOJ poses an existential threat to the United States.
“We can survive a lot, bad policy, funky elections, there’s a bunch of stuff that we can overcome, we can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system.”
He said that he would like to see movement towards “restoring some sense of the Justice Department being independent in making judgments about specific cases and prosecutions.”
Under Obama, the FBI, which is a part of the DOJ, opened a counterintelligence investigation in 2016 to examine whether individuals associated with then-candidate Donald Trump had links to Russian officials and whether there was any coordination.
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The investigation continued during Trump’s first term and was led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It concluded there were “multiple links” between Trump campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. However, it also found that “the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”
In July 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard alleged that Obama and senior intelligence officials improperly politicized intelligence about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence alleged that Obama directed the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which “served as the basis for what was essentially a years-long coup against the duly elected President of the United States, subverting the will of the American people and attempting to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency.”
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Gabbard said, “There is irrefutable evidence detailing how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an Intelligence Community Assessment that they knew was false, promoting the contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, as though it were true.”
Critics have disputed Gabbard’s allegations.
Fox News Digital reached out to Obama for comment.
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