“And I will say the audacity,” Joe Scarborough emphasizes in his astonishment over Barack Obama’s decision to weigh in on an open FBI investigation. It might have taken the Morning Joe hosts a while to get to the story, but Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski both wonder why a sitting president is making any comment on the renewed FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal. Of course, as Scarborough recalls, this isn’t the first time Obama has assumed the outcome of the probe (via the Free Beacon):

“I have no idea how Barack Obama has the audacity—and I will say the audacity—to make those statements when the Wall Street Journal points out this morning,” Scarborough said. “He [Obama] came out in November while FBI agents were still gathering evidence before they had all the evidence in their hands. He said in 2015 there was nothing here to see.” …

“The record is very clear on this point is, [Obama] is the last person in the world to cast aspersions in that realm, because he has been the worst of all actors in his position and most irresponsible from the start in trying to influence an investigation that he knew very little about,” Scarborough said.

Scarborough’s reference to the Wall Street Journal’s editors is certainly apt, as they also took Obama to task for his most recent comments and attempts to downplay the investigation. It amounts, they argue, for a “grossly inappropriate intervention” into a probe that might result in criminal charges:

He then absolved Mrs. Clinton of wrongdoing, though he can’t possibly know what the new evidence might be. “When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion of the FBI, the conclusion of the Justice Department, the conclusion of repeated congressional investigations was that she had made some mistakes but that there wasn’t anything there that was prosecutable,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama was no doubt signaling voters to ignore the FBI news, but his comments are also a grossly inappropriate intervention in a criminal case. He did the same in October 2015 and April 2016 when he said Mrs. Clinton had no ill intent—precisely the rationale Mr. Comey later used to exonerate Mrs. Clinton. Liberal pundits these days are lamenting the end of political “norms,” but they’d be more credible if they noticed that Mr. Obama is the leading offender.

It’s at least an “extremely awkward” intervention. It’s not exactly a subtle hint to Department of Justice officials to have the boss go on television and declare that there’s no case to try, as Obama has repeatedly done now. Allahpundit wrote about the selective outrage over “norms” now coming from Hillary Clinton’s allies, and more examples pour in.  Obama’s dismissal of Hillary’s deliberate choice to keep her official communications on a secret and private e-mail server in defiance of the Federal Records Act — and his own orders — demonstrate the extent to which Obama and the rest of his party will excuse anything as long as it’s done by a Democrat.

To answer Joe’s question, Obama has had that audacity all along. The deluge of bad news for his chosen successor, though, has spiked desperation high enough to make its exercise a necessity. Michael Ramirez puts his Pulitzer-winning talents into a bitingly accurate summation of the predicament in which Hillary and Democrats now find themselves: