In an interview released earlier this week with Stephen Colbert, former US president Barack Obama obliquely criticized his successor, Donald Trump. Discussing the Department of Justice, Obama didn’t single out any particular prosecution as being wrongly pursued, but noted that “we can’t overcome the politicization of the criminal justice system.”

People of good faith on both sides of the political divide would agree that justice ought to be pursued impartially and without regard for political tribe or party. That consensus starts to fray, however, when you ask people about the extent to which America’s federal government has departed from this ideal. Democrats would say it began around 20 January 2017 — the day Trump took office for his first term. Many Republicans, even those who are not great fans of the current president, would say the foundation began to rot much earlier than that, during the Obama administration.

One of the more notable scandals within Obama’s Department of Justice was Operation Fast and Furious, in which the DOJ and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) allowed guns to be smuggled over the border into Mexico. Some of them ended up killing Americans, including Border Patrol officer Brian Terry. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, stonewalled the Congressional investigations into the debacle. This was not a system that was working well when Trump inherited it.

An even more political use of the DOJ under Obama and Holder was their unprecedented use of the 1917 Espionage Act to investigate journalists who found themselves on the administration’s bad side. As the Associated Press noted in a 2018 article, “the Obama administration obtained the records of 20 Associated Press office phone lines and reporters’ home and cell phones,” and officials then seized them “without notice, as part of an investigation into the disclosure of information about a foiled al-Qaida terrorist plot”.

The same AP fact-check goes on to note that “Obama’s Justice Department also secretly dogged Fox News journalist James Rosen, getting his phone records, tracking his arrivals and departures at the State Department through his security-badge use,” while looking to obtain a search warrant to view his personal emails.

Both Obama and Trump presided over decaying boundaries between politics and prosecution, a continual erosion of the higher standards imposed after Watergate and other scandals from the Sixties and Seventies. Is Trump any worse? The recent prosecution of James Comey suggests so. That is just one inevitable result of a president who calls the shots from the Oval Office, rather than letting his appointees and the civil service do their job under an existing set of rules.

While it’s clear that Trump has abused his relationship with the DOJ, Obama was no saint during his presidency, either. For the former president to come out and lambast Trump as though he is a moral arbiter on the matter elides his own record. Instead, observers should pay attention and hold both presidents to a higher standard when it comes to ensuring justice in America.