President Joe Biden’s mysterious announcement ending his campaign for re-election invites comparisons to the politics of 1968, but Peter Schweizer sees another comparison – to the politics of 2008.

Schweizer calls it the “Obama coup” on the most recent episode of The Drill Down podcast.

There have been whispers in Washington that former President Barack Obama was unofficially pulling the strings of his former vice president’s administration. He has even spoken wishfully of doing it as a “third term.” Yet there was known to be a lot of bad blood between the two men, even predating Obama’s decision to endorse Hillary Clinton instead of Biden for president in 2016.

With the Democrats trying to rally their base around the swapped-in candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, it’s interesting to compare the history Obama has with both.

“The thing you have to understand is that Barack Obama has never really liked Joe Biden. Biden was imposed on him when Obama ran in 2008. He was told by the leadership in the Democratic Party: ‘you need somebody who’s seasoned, who’s experienced, because you’ve only been in the Senate for a few years,’” Schweizer says. “So, Joe Biden was kind of foisted on him.”

On the other hand, Drill Down co-host Eric Eggers notes that Obama and Harris have been close for years. “We talked about this in the book Profiles in Corruption. That book lays out the fact that actually the Obamas and Kamala Harris have been friends long before Barack Obama was in the US Senate. She campaigned for him vigorously… And that sort of formed a bond,” Eggers says. “When she became the district attorney in San Francisco, Barack Obama actually helped her retire some of her debts. He came and did a fundraiser as a senator from the state of Illinois for a local race in San Francisco. So, they’ve had this connection and this relationship going on well before.”

They were close enough that Obama could get away with joking in a speech for her that “she also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country.” When Harris ran for the Senate herself, media profilers started referring to her as “the female Obama.”

“I think what happened in this particular case is that it was Barack Obama who led the charge among the former senior officials in saying behind the scenes that Joe Biden needed to step down,” Schweizer says.

Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute have been covering Kamala Harris’s political cronyism, and following the money, for years. Eggers mentions one of the show’s earliest episodes in which Schweizer reviews Harris’s record as a prosecutor first in San Francisco, then as Attorney General for the state of California. The video details how Harris mishandled her responsibilities as a prosecutor, rose to political prominence, and how those close to her benefitted the most from her actions.

At a time when her predecessor in San Francisco, Terence Hallinan, had been building a case against Catholic priests that had sexually abused young boys, Harris ended those investigations after she was elected, going soft on the prosecutions. She also dropped cases against friends of her onetime boyfriend, the powerful Willie Brown.

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