Former President Barack Obama says he faced obstacles during his time in office when it came to commenting on the killings of Black Americans.
During the My Brother’s Keeper Leadership Forum, Obama explained his struggles with “institutional constraints” that prevented him from speaking out on the issue.
“There were some frustrations for me in my institutional role. … I went as far as I could just commenting on cases like Trayvon Martin or what was happening in Ferguson,” Obama said.
Obama noted he followed the notion the Department of Justice was independent and he could not “steer them.”
“I did not in any way want to endanger their capacity to go in and investigate and potentially charge perpetrators which meant that I could not come down or appear to come down decisively in terms of guilt or innocence in terms of what happened. So you had institutional constraints,” the former president continued. – READ MORE
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