Former President Barack Obama said on Thursday that the indictment of former President Donald Trump shows “nobody is above the law.”
Trump entered a plea of “not guilty” to all counts during his arraignment on June 13, after the special counsel secured a grand jury indictment on 37 counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, that was unsealed on June 9. “The fact that we have a former president who is having to answer to charges brought by prosecutors does uphold the basic notion that nobody is above the law,” Obama told CNN host Christiane Amanpour.
“I think I’m more concerned when it comes to the United States with the fact that not just one particular individual is, you know, being accused of undermining existing laws, but that more broadly, we’ve seen, whether it’s through the gerrymandering of districts, whether it’s, you know, trying to silence critics, through changes in legislative process, whether it’s the attempts to intimidate the press, a strand of anti-democratic sentiment that, you know, we’ve — we’ve seen in — in the United States, it’s something that is right now most prominent in the Republican Party, but I don’t think it’s something that is unique to one party,” Obama added. “I think there is a — a little less tolerance for ideas that don’t suit us.”
Republican presidential candidates, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, criticized the indictment of Trump, saying it was politically targeted.
Following the announcement that Hunter Biden would plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and be placed into a pre-trial diversion program on a gun charge, congressional Republicans, candidates for the Republican nomination for president in 2024 and legal experts all criticized the plea agreement for Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges, which some called a “sweetheart deal” for the son of President Joe Biden.
“And sort of the habits of — of a free and open exchange of ideas and the idea that, you know, we all agree to the rules of the game, and even if the outcomes aren’t always the ones we like, we still abide by those rules, I think that’s weakened since I left office, and we’re going to need to strengthen them again,” Obama said.
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