Barack Obama urges Trump: "No one in my government has been indicted"

Barack Obama highlighted Trump's legal difficulties in a speech delivered a day after the special council ended an advocacy agreement with the former president of the US President's campaign.

"Not only have I not been charged, but no one from my government has been charged," said the former president on Tuesday at a Rice University hearing.

"By the way, it's the only administration in modern history that can be said about it, in fact, nobody was nearly charged, probably because the people who told us joined for the right reasons. "

Mr. Obama's comments came on the same day that Mr. Trump called Robert Mueller, the special advocate, "prosecutor-at-law turned thug" after his office said Paul Manafort had repeatedly lied to FBI.

Manafort's "crimes and lies" in a series of interviews with lawyers mean that a plea agreement reached in September was no longer enforceable, Mueller's office told the court.

During the question-and-answer session to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the university's Baker Institute, a public policy think tank, Obama decried the dysfunction and partisanship in Washington.

"The extent to which the United States subscribes to the international order – it is not always obvious – but if there is a problem in the world, they do not call Moscow, they do not call Beijing. They call Washington, "he said.

"Even our opponents are waiting for us to solve the problems and keep us functioning, and when you start to get dysfunctional in Washington … that does not only weaken our influence, it also offers the opportunity for disorder to begin to intensify all over the world. "

He also expressed frustration at the state of the media landscape.

"By the time I take office, you have more and more a media environment in which, if you are a Fox News viewer, you have a reality totally different from that of a New York Times reader," did he declare.

In what was considered by some as a last blow, Mr. Obama seemed to be referring to the lack of respect on the part of the current White House occupier for the presidency.

"There is respect for this office," he says. "It's independent of you. And if you do not feel it, you should not be there because a lot of fighting, a lot of sacrifice, a lot of bloodshed is represented in this office. "