Joe Biden shared candid thoughts about some of his fellow Democrat politicians years before his presidency, according to recently released recordings of interviews with his ghostwriter.
Biden’s discussions from October 2016 through April 2017 with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer were published by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The discussions touched on a range of topics including fellow politicians Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders.
In a discussion on Nov. 3, 2016, Zwonitzer asked Biden, then serving as vice president, “Were you kind of a lonely voice on Ukraine at this point of the administration?”
Biden said, “I’ve been a lonely voice the whole f—ing time.” He said, “I kept making the [case], we pay now or pay later.”
Biden said he was the “lonely voice” on domestic policy issues and said he pushed to be more aggressive.
“I was a lonely voice on the middle class. I mean, I thought we should be much more aggressive than putting these guys in jail and the bankers,” Biden said, likely referring to the 2008 financial crisis.
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Biden added on Obama, “I mean, for real. It wasn’t idle. I mean, he used to really get pissed at me.”
As a sitting vice president, Biden did not seek the presidency in 2016. However, he said he considered it.
“You have the ability to be a unifier, a reassuring skill,” Biden recalled his advisers telling him; he shared those recollections in a Feb. 16, 2017 interview, less than a month after leaving office as vice president.
Biden was discussing the two leading Democratic primary candidates from 2016: Clinton, a former secretary of state, and Sanders, an Independent Vermont senator.
“Hillary is divisive and, and Bernie is too angry,” Biden recalled the advisers telling him. “You’d be brought into focus as the depth of your character, and understanding just how tough life can be, and your connection to those people.”
Biden said that President Obama discouraged a run for the White House.
“I think it was all about him trying to talk me into not running,” Biden said. “He was worried that if I got started with this, this, this draft Biden thing, I let it get out of hand, couldn’t go anywhere. … It would tarnish my image, tarnish my legacy.”
He recalled Obama said, “Just make sure it’s something that you can actually, actually get done, you know. Is it doable?”
“The fact is that he didn’t think it was doable at that time, that I could, that I could actually go out and get the nomination,” Biden told the writer.
Biden also mentioned classified materials in the interviews. The recordings were part of special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified information after he was vice president and before he was president. Hur opted not to prosecute, although he found that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” upon leaving the administration.
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