Obama insists again he was scandal-free

Official portrait of Barack Obama unveiled in February

Amid charges his administration used the Justice Department and the FBI as a political weapon to undermine the Trump campaign in 2016, including a surveillance operation reported by the New York Times, former President Barack Obama insisted this week once again that his eight years in office were free of scandal.

"I didn't have scandals, which seems like it shouldn't be something you brag about," Obama told the audience at a tech conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, reported Newsweek, which regarded the comment as a "light swing" at Trump.

Obama added that "if you look at the history of the modern presidency, coming out of the modern presidency without anybody going to jail is really good."

"It's a big deal," he said.

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Obama said he escaped scandal because he was able to accept bad news.

"No one in my White House ever got in trouble for screwing up as long there wasn't malicious intent behind it," he said.

Earlier this year, Newsweek noted, Obama made the same claim, telling an audience his administration "didn't have a scandal that embarrassed us, I know that seems like a low bar."

Newsweek acknowledged Obama's "foes" would beg to differ. The magazine listed "the 2012 Benghazi attack, his failure to close Guantanamo Bay, an IRS plan to scrutinize tax-exempt political groups based on the particulars of their politics and problems with the Affordable Care Act website."

In March, WND recalled 25 scandals that marred the Obama administration, and closing Gitmo was not on the list.

The Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, has turned in a draft report of his investigation of the Obama FBI's handling of the probe of Hillary Clinton's abuse of classified information.

On Monday, WND reported, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asked Horowitz to review the claim that the Obama administration placed an FBI informant inside the Trump campaign in 2016 to conduct surveillance.

Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, which has filed at least 30 lawsuits in pursuit of records related to the Obama administration’s investigation of alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, told WND this week amid more Democrat talk of impeaching Trump that if anyone should be impeached, it's Obama. He pointed to the recent revelation that the Obama administration placed an informant inside the Trump campaign and argued publicly available evidence and logic indicates Obama was involved.

Newsweek listed a "string of high-profile controversies" during Trump's first year and a half in office, including "possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, a hush payment of $130,000 to adult film star Stephanie Clifford (known as Stormy Daniels), issuing a travel ban on people from certain countries, firing FBI director James Comey, saying there were 'very fine people on both sides' of the Charlottesville conflict, calling members of MS-13 'animals,' and more."

At the Las Vegas conference, Obama also discussed his process for making difficult decisions while in the White House.

"I used to describe the nature of the presidency as having to make decisions about issues that nobody else could solve or are basically insolvable or at least not perfectly solvable," he said. "By definition, if a problem had an obvious solution to it, somebody else would have solved it before it got to me."

He said the capture of Osama bin Laden was an example of those decisions.