Trumps statement today on Hillary, Obama etc, and that HE will not seek to prosecute them is simple optics, and extremely important ones.
If you are freaking out about it, and seeing it as empirical evidence that "trump sold us out or will" please cool the jets, take a deep breath remove the emotion form you reaction and think logically/critically.
This is not rocket science... but I'll help.
Trump just put on the record, in the Oval Office, that people have urged him to go after Clinton, Biden, and Obama, that he believes he could have, and that he told them no because you cannot treat the presidency that way.
That is a contemporaneous public disclaimer. If any later investigation, referral, or charge ever moves forward through the DOJ, a special counsel, Congress, or state authorities, opponents cannot simply claim the sitting president ordered it.
He has already said the opposite on camera.
Actively calling for those arrests, or lobbying for them, would not merely make the process harder. It would actively derail it.
It would hand every court, every oversight hearing, and every media outlet a direct quote that the president demanded prosecutions of his predecessors and a former nominee.
Defense motions, congressional attacks, and news coverage would then center on presidential retribution instead of the underlying evidence, giving judges and the public an easy off-ramp to dismiss or discredit the cases regardless of what the records showed.
There is ZERO upside to connecting himself to the outcome and is in fact a direct risk that the connection itself kills the cases.
None of that required him to pretend the prior conduct was fine.
His first term, the disclosures that followed, the appointments, the declassifications, the public focus on the Russia investigation, the laptop, the border, and the documents cases all put specific actions under sustained scrutiny and created the records, witnesses, and political conditions others can now use.
Investigations into officials such as Comey and Brennan have continued.
The practical path to any accountability for the higher-profile figures runs through channels he does not control and does not need to direct. Publicly demanding the arrests would only supply the pretext to shut those channels down.
If you keeping reacting to what Trump says emotionally and without context of his 'actions', you are going to continue to get distracted by these things, and will not see what is really going on. The old saying actions mean more than words, comes into play here bigly.
Just saying... THINK don't react 👍
Reminder before the panicans jump all over this 👇