When President Donald Trump barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press briefings this week, Barack Obama couldn't resist weighing in, and he made a fool of himself doing it.

Reacting to the news, Obama said, "My imagination could not foresee some of the stuff that's going on right now. I believe there was just an announcement that the White House decided, you know what, CNN, MS NOW, maybe the New York Times was included, you just can't come to the White House press briefings anymore because you're giving the current president unfavorable coverage."

Obama continued, "I'm trying to think what would have happened if I had said, 'you know what, FOX News, get out of here.' It's unimaginable."

Except, he actually did.

Back in 2009, Obama tried to exclude Fox News from a White House pool interview with pay czar Ken Feinberg, only backing off after the rest of the press corps threatened to boycott the interview in solidarity. Obama has spent years since positioning himself as a champion of press freedom. The record says otherwise.

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In fact, Obama's Justice Department carried out one of the most aggressive crackdowns on journalists and whistleblowers in modern history. He prosecuted more leakers than all previous presidents combined, often locking people up for disclosures that turned out to be trivial.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Obama most definitely doesn't want you to remember that he spied on the media. 

Obama's Justice Department also seized phone records from Associated Press reporters and editors, spied on Fox News's James Rosen and New York Times reporter James Risen, and even labeled Rosen an "unindicted co-conspirator" for the crime of reporting the news. Dozens of major news organizations accused Obama of trampling the First Amendment, all without due process and often in total secrecy.

He wasn't done. Obama also tried to weaponize the FCC through his push for so-called "net neutrality," dressed up as fairness while really handing Washington more leverage over internet providers and, by extension, online speech.

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Obama also threatened journalists directly over unflattering coverage. After the 2013 sequestration cuts he tried to blame on Republicans, Bob Woodward exposed Obama’s own direct role in choosing what got cut. A senior White House official warned Woodward he would "regret" calling out Obama's role. Woodward refused to back down and went public with the threat, and once he did, other journalists came forward with strikingly similar stories of their own.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation didn't sugarcoat any of it, writing that "as president, Barack Obama harshly punished whistleblowers and took several steps that damaged press freedom." The organization went further, adding that "former President Barack Obama's press freedom record is marred by his administration's relentless prosecutions of whistleblowers, aggressive lobbying to kill FOIA reform, and promotion of government secrecy."

Here's the irony Obama conveniently skipped over: the media was overwhelmingly in love with him for eight years, while Trump gets more than 90% negative coverage. That gap alone makes Trump's complaint about a biased, agenda-driven press look pretty legitimate. And the fact that Obama can stand up today and call something "unimaginable" that he actually did himself tells you exactly how much he actually did get away with. The reason he got away with it is that no one called him out when he made his ridiculous claim, even though he was a corrupt, anti-free-press president.

And what’s worse is that he's still getting away with it now.