Obama Says Trump Crime Crackdown ‘Not Our Idea Of America’

He also warned against what he described as politicization within the justice system. “We don’t want kangaroo courts and trumped up charges. That’s what happens in other places that we used to scold for doing that,” Obama said. “We want our court system and our Justice Department and our prosecutors and our FBI to be just playing things straight and looking at the facts and not meddling in politics the way we’ve seen lately.”

Obama argued that long-standing legal norms and guardrails have been eroded in recent months. “We have blown through, just in the last six months, a whole range of not simply assumptions, but rules and laws and practices that were put in place to ensure that nobody is above the law and that we don’t use the federal government to simply reward our friends and punish our enemies,” he said.