Former President Barack Obama — and by extension, his Secret Service detail — reported for jury duty in Cook County, Illinois, at the Daley Center in Chicago on Wednesday morning. Just an average guy, doing his civic duty, nothing to see here:
One way to get bumped from jury duty: be Barack Obama
The former president did his civic duty in Chicago on Wednesday.
Jen Kirby is a senior foreign and national security reporter at Vox, where she covers global instability.
Unlike his fellow prospective jurors, Obama got to take the private elevator used by judges to get to the 17th-floor jury assembly room. Also unlike a lot of them, the former president got dismissed before noon, reports the Chicago Tribune.
Obama currently lives in Washington DC, with his family, so it’s probably time to change his address. He did get called for jury duty in Cook Country once as president, in 2010, where he used the convenient excuse of running the country and writing this State of the Union address to get out of it.
Obama follows the tradition of former White House occupants in fulfilling their obligations. George W. Bush got called but wasn’t picked for jury duty in Dallas in 2015 and former President Bill Clinton was dismissed from a federal jury in 2003 gang-related murder case. And President Donald Trump did his civic duty in August 2015, not long after he declared his candidacy. He was not asked to sit for the civil trial, but described it as “really good.”
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