No, This Isn’t Normal: Nobody Who Worked For President Obama Was Indicted

This is your daily reminder that this is not normal.

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It is not normal for a President’s former campaign manager to be indicted on conspiracy charges against the United States. It is not normal for the President’s people to hire lawyers.

As John Harwood pointed out Monday morning, it’s really hard to imagine what Fox News or Republicans would have been saying if Obama’s campaign chairman had just been indicted for conspiracy against the United States because nobody who worked for Obama got indicted.

None of this is normal.

Way back when, it would have and should have been an outrage that the President’s campaign manager was a foreign agent, let alone an unregistered one.

Republicans are pushing that Manafort played a limited role in Trump’s campaign, even though their ties go way back and Fortune noted that Manafort probably kept Trump’s campaign from derailing: “Manafort did not play a ‘limited role’ in the campaign. He was involved with the campaign for five months, serving as campaign chairman for three of those months until he resigned. Moreover, his roles in the campaign, particularly Convention Manager, were crucial, and arguably prevented a derailing of Trump’s nomination through a floor fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.”

None of this is normal. There are going to be a lot of desperate attempts to declare that this is normal, that it happened under President Obama, that it’s just part of being President. It is not. None of this is part of being President.

Trump’s whole entourage is drowning in possible indictments and ethics charges, a mere ten months in to his term. No, this is not normal. Not at all.

President Obama ran a very ethical White House, with very few actual scandals. It is possible to do. It takes honor, discipline, personal responsibility and integrity — from the top.

We should not expect perfect people, but we should demand people who uphold the law and democracy at the very least.

Sarah Jones

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Connect with Sarah on Post,  Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.