Last week, in an anonymous New York Times op-ed, a senior Trump official attempted to reassure the public that members of the administration were actively impeding their boss’s wishes. One member of the public wasn’t soothed: Trump’s predecessor. “The claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders, that is not a check,” Barack Obama said in a speech. “That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work. These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable.”

It was interesting timing for Obama to condemn executive branch defiance. This week marks the tenth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers, seen as the emblematic event of the financial crisis. And early in Obama’s first term, as he struggled to prevent further collapse, he faced similar insubordination from a key official: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

According to credible accounts, Geithner slow-walked a direct presidential order to prepare the breakup of Citigroup, instead undertaking other measures to nurse the insolvent bank back to health. This resistance to accountability for those who perpetrated the crisis, consistent with Geithner’s demonstrated worldview, had catastrophic effects—including the Trump presidency itself.

Ron Suskind was the first journalist to dig out this history, which has been largely forgotten, in his 2011 book Confidence Men. On March 15, 2009, Obama’s economic team met to discuss Citigroup, which had seen its stock price plummet after reporting $8.29 billion in losses for the fourth quarter of 2008. Toxic mortgage securities still cluttered Citi’s balance sheet, and two government bailouts totaling $45 billion, plus $306 billion in loan guarantees, had failed to stop the bleeding.

Larry Summers, then the National Economic Council director, was intrigued by the concept of nationalizing the sickest commercial banks, similar to what Sweden had done a decade earlier. Summers had discussed the mechanics of it with FDIC chairwoman Sheila Bair, as she recounted in her 2012 book Bull by the Horns. Obama had already publicly rejected nationalization in an interview with ABC News, but his economic team had differing viewpoints, which they hashed out in the March 2009 meeting.