Former President Barack Hussein Obama has finally directly involved himself in the 2020 presidential race on behalf of h is former partner in crime, Joe Biden.

Well, kind of. This week he swooped in for the rescue after a pro-Trump ad started running ads in South Carolina that were critical of the former vice president.

“Lawyers for President Obama have sent a cease-and-desist letter to a pro-Trump Super-PAC airing an ad that [allegedly] twists the former president’s words to smear Joe Biden,” New York magazine reported.

“The ad, which began airing Tuesday in South Carolina, uses a clip of Obama reading from his book Dreams from My Father to suggest that he thinks Biden is bad for African-Americans.”

To see the ad that provoked Obama’s anger, watch the clip below:

(Source: Committee to Defend the President

The video from the pro-Trump PAC known as the Committee to Defend the President begins with a presumably black narrator saying, “Joe Biden promised to help our community. It was a lie. Here’s President Obama.”

A clip from the audio version of Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,” then plays.

“Plantation politics,” the former president can be heard reading from his own book. “Black people in the worst jobs. The worst housing. Police brutality rampant. But when the so-called black committeemen came around election time, we’d all line up and vote the straight Democratic ticket — sell our souls for a Christmas turkey.”

The narrator then concludes, “Enough empty promises. President Trump promised us jobs and he delivered. Democrats don’t care about us.”

While both Obama and his left-wing media allies have a history of distortions, smears and lies, this time some claim they actually have a point. The problem is specifically that the words that were uttered by the former president had nothing to do with Biden.

“[T]he words come from a passage in Obama’s book when a barber is describing politics in Chicago before the 1983 election of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor,” NY magazine notes.

Never once has Biden held any sort of position in Chicago, let alone Illinois. Prior to becoming vice president, he served as a Delaware senator from 1973 to 2009. And prior to that, he was a member of the New Castle County Council.

Yet to some it seemed the ad tried to portray Obama’s remarks as a referendum on Biden. And this angered both the former president and his staff.

“This despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina by taking President Obama’s voice out of context and twisting his words to mislead viewer,” the former president’s communications director, Katie Hill, said in a statement this week.

“In the interest of truth in advertising, we are calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate.”

The ad has also angered Obama’s supporters, who’ve rushed to Twitter to slam the Committee to Defend the President:

Most sinister Ad I have ever seen. You take the great honorable President Barack Obama’s Words (he was reading a totally different book) and twist them into something he never said. I hope after a Democratic President wins, they hit your group with a multi-Billion $$ FINE!!! @BBC — Magnum Serpentine (@MagnumSerpenti1) February 27, 2020

This ad is a twisted mislead crap lie! With that being said, I’m not surprised. This is a example of what happens when you know the good guy is possibly going to win 2020. Go Joe Biden 2020 !! — Patty Edmunds (@mpedmunds) February 27, 2020

Trump and his minions play dirty. They will continue to do so until after the election is over, and maybe longer. Dirty politics is all that trump knows. He would have no idea how to play fairly. And this is the fool that runs our country. — Vicki Istre (@VickiIstre) February 27, 2020

LIE

“PolitiFact found that the audio is Obama reading a quotation from a barber about Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington, where the man says, ‘Plantation politics. Black people in the worst jobs.The worst housing. Police brutality rampant…’” — Social Media Marketing Queen (@theashoxford) February 27, 2020

“Trump and his minions play dirty,” one Obama supporter wrote.

That’s a dubious assertion.

First, the PAC isn’t directly linked to the president.

Second, top-level Democrats like House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff have repeatedly played dirty and continue to play dirty — and all with no scrutiny from the media.

The committee has for its part pushed back on the growing criticism by arguing that it’d just been trying to point out how the Democrat Party has failed time and time again to do anything substantive for the black community.

“It’s Obama’s own voice, reading the words he wrote himself to express his own ideas, in EXACTLY this context – Democrats doing nothing for black voters and expecting to buy their votes with cheap promises,” a tweet that was retweeted by the committee reads. “It took @realDonaldTrump to FINALLY make a change. It’s time to #WalkAway.”

See other retweets and tweets from the committee below:

It’s Obama’s own voice, reading the words he wrote himself to express his own ideas, in EXACTLY this context – Democrats doing nothing for black voters and expecting to buy their votes with cheap promises. It took @realDonaldTrump to FINALLY make a change. It’s time to #WalkAway — Dan Backer (@DanBackerEsq) February 26, 2020

Congrats @BarackObama and the @DNC you just guaranteed that millions of people OUTSIDE of South Carolina will now Google the ad and watch it, increasing its views well beyond what they would have been if it had remained a small market ad. Bravo ? — John C (@JohnC03573233) February 27, 2020