President Obama offered a “what if,” during a podcast interview published this week, about President Trump planning to send the National Guard to Chicago:

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It’s almost too easy of a thought experiment. Hey, if I had sent in the National Guard into Texas and just said, You know what, lot of problems in Dallas. Yeah, a lot of crime there. And I don’t care what Governor Abbott says. I’m going to kind of take over law enforcement because I think things are out of control. It is mind-boggling to me how Fox News would have responded. I mean, there were times- I remember there was a moment, I don’t remember what year this was, where the military just had regular exercises in Texas, out of one of the bases-Fort Hood or- and Ted Cruz and a number of other folks were out there lending credence to the fact that I was preparing for, you know, the whole black-helicopter, one-world-government- I was about to take over Texas. And this is, like, a sitting U.S. Senator who’s kind of retweeting about what’s going on with these exercises. I didn’t even- I didn’t monitor military exercises because, you know what? That was the Pentagon’s job. That was the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the-that was their job: to prepare and focus on military readiness, and they made a report to me. The point is that 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. And the same thing is obviously happening in the Justice Department. So people are right to be concerned.

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