Wall Street Journal questions Obama remarks in Flynn case: ‘We wonder what he’s really worried about’

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board is asking why former President Obama commented on the Justice Department’s decision to drop the case against former national security adviser Michael Flynn, asking “what he’s really worried about.”

“Barack Obama is a lawyer, so it was stunning to read that he ventured into the Michael Flynn case in a way that misstated the supposed crime and ignored the history of his own Administration in targeting Mr. Flynn,” the editorial board wrote. “Since the former President chose to offer his legal views when he didn’t need to, we wonder what he’s really worried about.”

The perspective comes after Attorney General William Barr dropped the charges of lying to the FBI against Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, after unsealed documents showed one bureau agent asking in a handwritten note whether the bureau’s goal was to “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

Obama weighed in on the decision during a call on Friday, the details of which were leaked to Yahoo News and confirmed by his spokeswoman.

“There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free,” Obama said to approximately 3,000 members of the Obama Alumni Association.

“That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic—not just institutional norms—but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”

The Journal also accused Obama of being “eager to distort the truth” ahead of an investigation being conducted by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the Russia investigation.

“Donald Trump’s victory increased the chances that this unprecedented spying on a political opponent would be uncovered, which would have been politically embarrassing at the very least. Targeting Mr. Flynn—and flogging the discredited Steele dossier—kept the Russia collusion pot boiling and evolved into the two-year Mueller investigation that turned up no evidence of collusion,” the board states.

“This among other things is what U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating at the request of Attorney General William Barr. Maybe that’s why Mr. Obama is so eager to distort the truth of the Flynn prosecution,” the editors argued.

Trump over the weekend tweeted or retweeted more than 50 times about investigations conducted by the FBI and House Intelligence Committee into his 2016 campaign and alleged connections to Russia.

In April 2019, former special counsel Robert Mueller and his team concluded that Trump and his campaign associates did not collude or conspire with Russian officials leading up to the 2016 election.