Barack Obama — the man who spent eight years in the White House perfecting the art of saying absolutely nothing while sounding deeply profound — has released a statement about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting. And in a twist that surprised exactly zero people, the former president says the motive is “unknown.”

Unknown! The shooter left behind a written manifesto. He literally did Obama’s homework for him and Barry still flunked the test.

The statement is vintage Obama. It’s got all the classics: the call for unity, the solemn tone, the carefully constructed sentences that manage to express deep concern without actually saying anything specific. It’s like watching a man juggle smoke.

“We may not yet fully understand what drove this act of violence,” Obama wrote, or words to that effect. Sure, Barack. The manifesto quoting your party’s talking points word-for-word is a real head-scratcher. Somebody get this man a decoder ring.

For those keeping score at home, the shooter — Cole Allen — left behind a manifesto that explicitly cited Trump as a “fascist dictator” and a “threat to democracy.” Those phrases didn’t come from some underground radical forum. Those came from Democrat campaign speeches. From CNN panels. From Obama’s own endorsement tour for Kamala Harris, where he warned America that democracy itself was on the ballot.

But the motive? Unknown. Total mystery. Could’ve been anything, really. Maybe he was mad about gas prices. Maybe his DoorDash order was late. Who can say?

(The manifesto can say. The manifesto says it very clearly. In writing. On paper.)

This is the Sergeant Schultz strategy and Obama has been running it for decades. “I see NOTHING! I hear NOTHING! I know NOTHING!” The IRS targeting conservative groups? Obama found out from the news, just like everybody else. Fast and Furious? No idea. His own DOJ spying on a presidential campaign? Couldn’t possibly have known.

And now a guy who parroted every single line of Democrat anti-Trump rhetoric shoots up the biggest media event in Washington and Obama — the man who pioneered the “threat to democracy” talking point — says the motive is a mystery.

Pull the other one, Barry. It’s got bells on.

Here’s what Obama’s statement really is: a firewall. It’s designed to put distance between the Democrat establishment and the logical consequence of their own words. If the motive is “unknown,” then nobody has to answer for the years of deranged rhetoric that produced this guy. If the motive is “unknown,” then nobody has to explain why they compared a democratically elected president to Adolf Hitler every single day for eight straight years.

Convenient, isn’t it?

Every other former president managed to acknowledge reality in their statements. But Obama — the smartest man in every room he’s ever walked into, just ask him — can’t seem to connect the dots between “we told everyone Trump was going to destroy America” and “someone tried to violently stop Trump from destroying America.”

It’s not that he can’t connect them. He won’t. Because connecting them means admitting that the rhetoric his party built its entire brand around for the last decade has real-world consequences. And Barack Obama has never admitted fault for anything in his entire political career. He’s not about to start now.

So instead we get the “unknown motive” treatment. We get the thoughtful statement. We get the calls for unity that really mean “please stop talking about this before someone reads the manifesto and notices it sounds exactly like my speeches.”

Too late. We’ve read it. The whole country has read it. And nobody — not even the smoothest politician of his generation — can memory-hole a written confession.

The motive isn’t unknown, Barack. It’s just inconvenient. There’s a difference.