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His comments come at a time when the Trump administration has actively targeted major law firms with executive orders. Since February, former President Trump has signed orders against firms such as Paul Weiss, Perkins Coie, and Covington & Burling. The orders stripped their security clearances and opened up scrutiny of their government contracts, accusing them of turning the justice system into a political weapon.
Some law firms—like Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis—chose to comply, even offering free legal services to conservative causes. Others, including Perkins Coie and WilmerHale, took a more aggressive stance by launching lawsuits to challenge the Trump orders.
Obama didn’t stop at law firms. He also took a jab at higher education institutions for bowing to Trump-era demands. He criticized Columbia University, his own alma mater, for giving in to pressure from the Trump administration after a looming threat of losing $400 million in federal funding. The funding was cut in response to Columbia’s alleged failure to address anti-Semitism during campus protests over the Israel–Gaza conflict.
“If your core mission, if your core value is to teach, you may teach without compromising values of academic independence. Yeah, you may lose some grant money temporarily. That’s why you have those big endowments,” Obama stated.
The former president also issued a stark warning about America’s political future during a separate appearance at The Connecticut Forum on June 17. Referring to Trump, Obama cautioned, “We’re not there yet completely, but I think that we are dangerously close to normalizing behavior like that,” suggesting the country is inching toward autocracy.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is under fire for how he handled presidential pardons during his final days in office. According to The New York Times, Biden employed an autopen to sign off on a sweeping wave of clemency measures that impacted more than 1,500 individuals—a move the White House touted as the largest one-day clemency action in U.S. history.
In his defense, Biden said he personally made all the clemency decisions, telling the Times, “We’re talking about [granting clemency to] a whole lot of people.” However, the outlet also reported that Biden did not review each individual case. Instead, he approved general criteria and allowed aides to determine who qualified.
“Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, [Biden] signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence,” the report explained.
Because of time constraints and volume, his team used the autopen—a mechanical device that replicates a signature—to finalize documents, rather than having the president manually sign each one.
This revelation has sparked outrage among Republicans, who argue that Biden’s use of the autopen on such a large scale raises questions about transparency and leadership. Critics claim the move undermines the gravity of presidential pardons by turning them into what one GOP official called “rubber-stamped mercy.”
The contrasting actions of Obama and Biden paint a revealing portrait of today’s Democrat establishment—one lecturing legal and academic elites for surrendering too easily, while the other deflects responsibility amid a mechanized clemency operation.
As the 2024 election season approaches, both former presidents find themselves in the spotlight—not for their leadership, but for how they’re navigating a country that’s rapidly shifting under the weight of political division and public distrust.
