I'm anti-Trump but let's acknowledge Obama was a shady figure
http://www.bookforum.com/booklist/17438
The era of Obama is over. Now the majority of Americans may see it clearly for the first time. Over the past eight years, it has become apparent that President Obama's presence in office was a distortion. His calm demeanor and steady optimism seduced liberals into thinking that they were living in good—if occasionally dull—days, at war with an intransigent Congressional GOP, but blind to the breadth and power of the reaction brewing below. Liberals were often frustrated by the slow progress under Obama, even offended by the indifference and injustice that persisted in the practice of American power, but the White House and its boosters in the respectable media always had their rebuke: Don't worry. We're getting there. Trust the process.
That calm is over and for many, the sudden chaos of the political situation comes as a shock. What happened? When did the country become so precarious again? But there is no "again." None of this is sudden. It is only that, in the absence of President Obama, every cruelty that persisted or grew under his stewardship has come fully out into the open. Some of this was the former president's doing. Some of it was not. But none of our problems are concealed by the veneer of steady progress anymore.
Obama was a bad president, Clinton was a bad candidate, and the Democrats are the main group to blame, since their failure gave an odious Trump the presidency, no matter how much saber-rattling tries to pin it on Russia.
There is a meaning of this sentence that implies a malfunctioning or misguided proximity-based home security system, probably using Bluetooth. But every time you've heard someone say something like this, they haven't meant it that way.
"I can't eat peanuts."
There is a meaning of this sentence that implies a sophisticated and unbypassable filtration system in front of the speaker's mouth. But every time you've heard someone say something like this, they haven't meant it that way.
Obama's statement isn't unambiguous, but not using phrasing such as "lack the power to" or "Constitutionally prohibited from" carries inferential weight, too.
In your examples, logically they are both lies. But, the meaning that is being transmitted is something more akin to: there some obvious, if unmentioned, reason why an action would be undesirable. And, this meaning is pretty clear to an average person in both cases.
Obama has logically lied. There is no question about that. But of course, we aren't talking about whether he lied, but whether he implied something untrue.
Given his response, "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves", it's pretty obvious that an average modern American would at least assume the implied meaning is that something outside of his control is preventing him.
Therefore, your contention that he could have been implying "I can't because I choose not to", could not be correct, since he knew who his audience was, and having decades of practice as a career politician communicating with that audience, knew very well the meaning they would take from that.
So he was either lying about what he could do, ignorant of the presidential pardon power or purposefully manipulative in his word choice.
> Or Obama was making the moral point that he couldn't pardon Snowden before he stood in court and faced justice.