Breaking Biden: Exposing the Hidden Forces and Secret Money Machine Behind Joe Biden, His Family, and His Administration - Couverture souple

Marlow, Alex

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 166804451X ISBN 13 : 9781668044513

Editeur : Threshold Editions, 2023

Synopsis

The New York Times bestselling author of the “must-read” (Sean Hannity) Breaking the News and editor-in-chief of Breitbart News Network returns with this timely and eye-opening deep dive investigation into the 46th president.

Over his 50-year career in Washington, Joe Biden has become known for his wild dishonesty, embarrassing policy failings, and an absolute lack of accountability, culminating in his predictably unpopular presidency. But what has not yet been revealed is the vast web of consultants, bureaucrats, corporate titans, foreign interests, and various extended family members (it’s not just Hunter!) who have achieved unfathomable wealth and power while keeping Biden in charge.

Now, Alex Marlow reports the findings of a shocking, in-depth investigation into the individuals and entities behind the devastating decisions that have empowered the global elite at the expense of the American public. With his signature “prescient” (Tucker Carlson) writing, Marlow unearths new details such as:

EXPOSED: The secret cadre of consultants running Joe Biden’s Washington.
EXPLAINED: How Joe Biden sold America’s intellectual property to communist China.
UNCOVERED: The unreported and audacious reason the underwhelming, under-qualified, and unpopular Kamala Harris was chosen to be vice president.
REVEALED: All the ways the Bidens’ bag cash off of the family name.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

Alexander Marlow is the New York Times bestselling author of Breaking the News and Breaking Biden. He serves as editor in chief of Breitbart News Network, where he started as Andrew Breitbart’s first employee at the age of twenty-one. He is also a national talk radio host and podcaster. Alex has been on the cover of Time and Newsweek, named in Forbes’s 30 Under 30, and called “perhaps the most significant media figure in America.”

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Chapter 1: Joe Biden Can Do Anything

CHAPTER 1 Joe Biden Can Do Anything

Before Joe Biden Jr. was born, his father had a taste of the good life, courtesy of his wealthy “uncle” Bill Sheene Jr., an Irishman who had amassed success selling sealants for coffins.

For the first five years of Joe Jr.’s life, his father, Joe Biden Sr., was in business with the Sheenes. During World War II, the Sheenes’ company received a lucrative deal with the U.S. government to supply their patented sealant for armor plates; Joe Sr. moved north to helm the company’s Boston branch. For a time, the family didn’t want for anything. They moved into a big home. His father and uncle would pilot company planes, hang out on the Sheenes’ yacht, and hunt pheasant together. For the first few years of his existence, Joe Biden Jr. was pampered, too, getting presents like fancy toys and even a pony.1 (Perhaps Joe was the original “dog-faced pony soldier.”)

As it is now, the business of unstabilizing geopolitical turmoil was a good one in the 1940s.

But the war ended, and in time, Sheene’s access to vast sums of government funds dried up. Thus, so did the Bidens’, at least for the time being.

Uncle “Big Bill” Sheene had a reputation as a philanderer and a gambler. He was also an alcoholic and was said to go on benders that could last for weeks. All of this vice might have been his method of coping with a debilitating stutter that caused him setbacks throughout his life. He did, however, dote lavishly on his “nephew,” Joe, whose own father also abused alcohol but had not struck the same luck in business.2

Bill Sheene’s son, Bill III, was Joe Biden Jr.’s pal, so Joe was invited to share in his favorite cousin’s largesse. He spent summers with the Sheenes through early adulthood. He rode horses with them and played on their golf course. They visited the dog races together. Joey absorbed the fashion, mien, and etiquette of their social strata, without actually belonging to it. His uncle supplied him a job, money, and even wheels.

Reporter Adam Entous, who has enjoyed direct access to the Biden family for several stories on their history and struggles, suggested Sheene’s business was crooked from the start. Uncle Bill relied on scary, mobbed-up dudes to get where he was going. Sheene had a professional relationship with Arthur Briscoe, a bootlegger who served stints in a mental hospital. He was diagnosed with “psychopathic personality.” Right after Briscoe began a relationship with a woman who had connections to the mob, his second wife was scalded to death in a bathtub, clearing the way for him to marry his mistress. “There was no autopsy and the death was declared an accident…. They couldn’t pin anything on him.” When his and Sheene’s new venture, the Maritime Welding & Repair Company, faced increasing gripes from maritime unions, he elicited the help of notorious mobster Frank Costello, and the picketing soon ceased.3

Joe Biden Sr. made one last grandiose bet with Bill Jr.: they bought an airport. But mere months into the venture, it failed, too. Bill Sheene took back the car he had given Joe Jr., and the Bidens moved in with Jean’s parents and siblings, the Finnegans, in Scranton.

This fall from grace presumably had an effect on Joe Jr., though the rest of his siblings—Valerie (born 1945), James (born 1949), and Frank (born 1953)—did not bask in luxury for much of their childhoods.

Joe’s earliest years would have overlapped with his father’s loss of the family’s previous status. This certainly proved to be a driving influence on the rest of Joe’s life, which is marked by constant striving to take his family to the next echelon of American society.

MORE BALLS THAN BRAINS

To hear Biden’s friends tell it, young Joe didn’t think, he just did—especially when it came to dares or fights. Locals still talk about it in Scranton. In his epic-length book on the 1988 presidential election, What It Takes: The Way to the White House, Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ben Cramer illustrates this bravado with a couple of anecdotes. In 1953, ten-year-old Joey and his buddies would wander around town looking for something to do. One day, another youngster bet Joey and another kid five bucks that they wouldn’t be able to climb the town culm dump. Culm is the residual debris left over from coal mines that, in those days, was piled high as mountains and burned over the course of years, “lava-hot on the surface, except where it burned out underneath, and then there’d be a pocket of ash where you could fall right into the mountain, if you stepped on it.” While the other child chickened out, Joe, in a reckless dismissal of fate, took the dare and climbed up it, roughly two hundred feet to the top, covering millions of tons of fiery soot. According to Cramer, Joe never saw the five bucks, but he did catch a fleeting glimpse of immortality.4

In another incident, an older kid named Jimmy Kennedy (who later became a judge in Scranton) dared Joe to run under the wheels of a moving dump truck. He said later that he never thought that Joe would do it. But Joe did, so the story goes. He was small and ran between the front and back wheels, letting one of the axles go over him. As Cramer puts it, “Joe Biden had balls. Lot of times more balls than sense.”5

Poetic.

It was this reckless moxie at inappropriate moments that made young Joey Biden the talk of Scranton and stayed with him into older age. Those who knew him there were probably unsurprised when, for instance, in 2019, he challenged one prospective voter to a push-up contest after the man, himself eighty-three years old, dared to question him about his old age.6

Joe was scrappy as a youth, and he needed to be. After all, the family was struggling.

They finally were able to escape the cramped house with their extended family in it when he was eleven years old for (marginally) greener pastures: the tenements of Delaware. Joe repeated the third grade after moving to Wilmington. He claims in his memoirs that it was to have his tonsils and adenoids out, but there is certainly reason to speculate it could have been that he simply wasn’t keeping up.

Joe Sr. tried work cleaning boilers, selling doodads on a farm, and finally, selling cars, a profession that embarrassed him. According to Entous, even though the Bidens lived a “comfortable middle-class existence” and had that taste of the good life, Joe Sr. couldn’t shake the sense of failure, and that, in turn, instilled in the Biden children a desire to move up in the world.7 Joe Sr. had been someone once, and the Bidens identified as a feisty family of modest means fighting for a better life. This perspective typified the down-home culture of Delaware in the 1950s and ’60s, and Joe Biden Jr. had internalized it.

Even when Joe Jr. was still a boy, he started putting that philosophy into action.

For several years the Biden family lived across the street from Archmere Academy, one of the most prestigious Catholic schools in Delaware.8 Archmere occupies the former estate of John J. Raskob, a famous industrialist who was an executive for DuPont and General Motors, ran the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and is credited with building the Empire State Building. The school represents the pinnacle of the upper-crust Delaware identity to which Joe Biden aspired. Staring across the street at that impressive estate made an impression on the young Biden: he called it his “Oz.”9

By this time, however, Archmere was above the means and status of the family. Still, Joe’s grandiose vision that the Bidens would one day be among the elite had already taken hold. He needed Archmere. Joe was eventually admitted, even though his attendance at the school strained his family’s finances.

Biden, who was undersized at five feet one and 100 pounds, entered the school with a number of obstacles in his path. Aside from the socioeconomic realities and the fact that he was not (nor would he ever be) an academic all-star, he still had that stutter, which was severe enough that he was excused from having to stand up for requisite public speaking exercises. Though Joe himself said that he had begun to overcome the affliction by then, he still was nicknamed “Joe Impedimenta” by cruel peers.

The nicknames and bullying didn’t stop there. He was given another moniker by classmates: “Dash.” This wasn’t a reference to his speed on the football field, either. It was “like Morse code—dot dot dot, dash dash dash dash,” according to Biden himself.10

In case you’re searching for the origin of why adult Joe Biden seems to constantly fantasize about fistfighting people, I believe we’ve found the answer.

Nonetheless, he was ambitious and gradually harnessed some natural charisma, which propelled him to become class president;11 he was ineligible to be president of the entire student body due to too many demerits. He also was a standout on a dominant Archmere football team. Joe was already ascending to legendary status in his own mind both on and off the field. According to Biden family lore, Joe led eight football players in a walkout of the Charcoal Pit restaurant when they refused to serve a black team member inside.12 This was a relatively minor gesture in the scheme of the civil rights movement, but it became an indelible part of Joe’s political narrative. He even made sure to return to the restaurant as vice president with President Barack Obama. They made sure to eat indoors.

To listen or read Joe wax on about his high school glory days, you would have thought he grew into a studly character out of a Hollywood movie. Archmere still occupies a special place in his heart—he sent all three of his kids there and eventually brought the football team to the White House.13

Next up for Joe was the University of Delaware. During these years, Biden was a “teetotaling semi-jock with a sweater around his neck—the type who seemed more consumed with date nights than civil rights,” according to a 2020 New York Times profile. Biden played on football team during his freshman year, but left after one season ostensibly to focus on his lackluster grades.14 Biden eventually did graduate in 1965, ranking near the bottom of his class.

It was on a spring break trip in the Bahamas that he met the woman who would become his first wife, a Syracuse student named Neilia Hunter. She was at a pool party Joe crashed at a Nassau resort. They went out for hamburgers, which Joe claims were pricier than what he could afford, so she helped him pay for the tab. The way he describes it, the typically cocksure Joe was charmingly befuddled the entire date. He kept embarrassing himself while she fell in love with him. He believed by the end of the first date that they would be married. It’s a romantic story, if a bit saccharine.

Joe pursued his JD at Syracuse law school, but he really appeared to be pursuing Neilia. Joe’s academic record was pathetic, but that did not stop him from claiming he was on a full-ride scholarship.15 Though he was an academic dud, his political skills continued to develop. The only class he aced was legislation,16 garnering praise from his professor for his “presence” in the classroom.17 These were rare bright spots on his academic record.

Biden nearly flunked a course in law school when he was caught plagiarizing five(!) pages from a law review article published years earlier. Joe begged for forgiveness in a letter defending his name that, in retrospect, looks entirely unmoored from reality: “My intent was not to deceive anyone. For if it were, I would not have been so blatant,” he wrote in a letter to law school faculty. “If I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?”18

Passages of the letter read like the lunatic ravings of a desperate man.

“I value my word above all else,” Biden pleaded. “This is a fact which is known to all those who are or have been acquainted with my character.”

Years later we would know for certain that his pleas were all a put-on to try to avoid more humiliation and maybe even expulsion, as this would not be the last time he was busted plagiarizing.

He didn’t so much graduate from law school as he did survive it. But he did marry Neilia during this time, so it wasn’t entirely unproductive.

Newlywed Joe even bought his new bride a dog. He named it Senator.19

THE ROAD TO THE SENATE

After leaving law school, Joe Biden worked at a corporate law firm in Wilmington and as a public defender. Though this stint would later be used to claim progressive bona fides, it didn’t last long.20 He was mere moments away from entering politics, a field where he would remain for the next half century.

It was clear early in his professional career that Joe did not have a defined political ideology. He was less interested in issues than image. Politics was a channel to get respect and elevate his family. In 1970, at twenty-seven years old, armed with youth, ambition, and an intuitive sense of which ways the political winds were blowing, he officially entered the political arena, running a successful campaign for the New Castle County Council.21

During this time, Joe and Neilia were rapidly expanding the Biden family. Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden III was born on February 3, 1969; Robert Hunter Biden came almost exactly a year later on February 4, 1970; and Naomi Christina “Amy” Biden was brought into the world on November 8, 1971.

In 1972, Joe mounted his first campaign for the U.S. Senate, successfully defeating former governor and two-term senator J. Caleb Boggs in a major upset. Boggs, who was sixty-three, got outmaneuvered by the fresh-faced, twenty-nine-year-old Joe. Biden effectively portrayed himself as a high-energy, forward-thinking outsider, tuned in to hip issues like civil rights, ending the Vietnam War, and protecting the environment.

Meanwhile, the Biden family machine was being assembled. The family shrewdly operated as a single unit during the campaign, modeling themselves after the Kennedys. During the run, they acted as if they all were on the ballot, answering questions in the first-person plural, using language like “We haven’t decided what our position is on that” or “We aren’t running for president.”22 Joe’s twenty-seven-year-old sister, Valerie, a former homecoming queen at the University of Delaware, broke a glass ceiling by running the campaign.23 Biden kinfolk would organize coffee klatches and canvas door-to-door, Joe’s brother James “Jim” Biden served as finance chairman for the campaign, and brother Frank Biden organized student volunteers on campuses.

The clannish mentality of the Finnegans, Jean’s family, profoundly influenced how she raised her own children. Growing up, they already thought of themselves as a dynasty; the world just didn’t know it yet. His mother would say, “There’s nothing in life but family,” and “You’re a Biden. You can do anything. There’s nobody, anywhere, better than you. Maybe just as good, in a different way… but not any goddamn better.”24

Biden also benefited from something during this Senate run that might seem familiar: an information blackout. Boggs, his Republican opponent and long-standing Delaware incumbent, was set to release a slew of damning political ads against Biden in the week leading up to the election. In a stroke of good fortune for Joe, the unions staged a strike the night before the ads ran and the paper shut down. The ads didn’t reach the public on a wide scale.

It reminds me of a recent presidential election.

Biden’s ads in 1972, unlike the oppo research against him, did hit a vast audience and were apparently quite effective. The Biden campaign stressed how he, and not the aging Boggs, was in touch with the real issues facing voters. The strategy, coupled with the oppression of Boggs’s attack ads, was enough to give Joe Biden a three-thousand-vote victory on November 7, 1972.

The full story of the suppression of those Boggs ads remains a mystery. At the time, it seemed like Joe simply got tremendously lucky, but prosecutor Charles Brandt later insinuated there was foul play involved in the episode, in his book I Heard You Paint Houses, on mafia hitman Frank Sheeran. (The book would later be adapted into the movie The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci.) Sheeran was an infamous Teamsters union official. Brandt claims that someone visited Sheeran to ask if he could prevent the evening and morning papers from running Caleb Boggs’s campaign advertisements. “I told him I would hire some people and put them on the picket line for him. They were people nobody would mess with,” Sheeran is quoted as saying.

Was Joe Biden aware of any of this? Brandt claims he has no way of knowing.25

The world may never know for certain if Biden’s 1972 Senate election was rigged, or if Joe knew what measures organized crime had taken on his behalf.

Biden would be only thirty years and forty-four days old when he was sworn in, making him one of the youngest senators in U.S. history. Yet his life would be immeasurably different that day than it was on election night, because Joe Biden was about to experience ineffable tragedy.

JOE GETS KNOCKED DOWN

One of Joe Biden’s favorite lines is one he attributes to his father: “[T]he measure of a man wasn’t how many times or how hard he got knocked down, but how fast he got back up.”26 That wisdom never mattered more than after the events of December 18, 1972.

Just days before he was to be sworn in following his Senate win, Joe’s first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden, age thirty, and their infant daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash when their station wagon collided with a hay truck while they were out shopping for Christmas presents. His two young sons, Hunter and Beau, were badly injured in the accident, requiring extended hospitalization, but survived. Hunter suffered from head injuries and Beau from multiple fractures. The accident, unsurprisingly, took an incalculable toll on Joe.

He contemplated quitting the Senate before he even got started, but Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) dangled prestigious committee assignments in front of him to encourage him to stay. The Senate passed a resolution in order to allow Joe to be sworn in bedside to Beau and Hunter while they were still hospitalized.27

Joe said in his memoir, Promise Me, Dad, that he contemplated suicide,28 but ultimately his boys saved his life.

Young and handsome and a newly elected senator who’d won in upset fashion, he was already becoming a celebrity, but it became a media frenzy when tragedy befell Joe Biden. These circumstances enhanced his public image, but it also made him wary of the press. He was reluctant to be open with journalists, but he decided to sit with Kitty Kelley for a Washingtonian magazine profile in 1974, a decision that would poison the media for him forever.

The senator’s openness about the tragedy led to some uncomfortable—and, frankly, inappropriate—moments. “My beautiful millionaire wife,” he called Neilia, bizarrely. (Neilia’s parents owned a diner.)29 Joe repeatedly spoke of Neilia in lustful tones. “Neilia was my very best friend, my greatest ally, my sensuous lover. The longer we lived together the more we enjoyed everything from sex to sports,” he told the journalist, for no apparent reason. “She had the best body of any woman I ever saw. She looks better than a Playboy bunny, doesn’t she?” he said, showing Kelley a photo of Neilia in a bikini. No matter how long and arduous the campaigning days could be, Joe boasted, he still would be able to “satisfy” Neilia “in bed.”

Do you get it, ladies? Joe isn’t just an elected leader. He’s a tiger in the sack and he wants you to know it.

Perhaps he was trying to impress the young reporter because she was blond. Maybe he was cribbing off the Kennedys again.

“I know I could have easily made the White House with Neilia,” Joe crowed during the interview. “And my family still expects me to be there one of these days.” I guess he got that one right.

Whatever the explanation for his forthrightness, heavy pervert vibes came through in the published article.

After the interview, in which Kelley compared him to Jay Gatsby (not a compliment), he blamed the journalist for making him seem “slightly unhinged.”30

The interview has haunted Joe ever since, causing him to hate the press. Biden was apparently so spooked that he wouldn’t do another interview for fifteen years, when he spoke to the Washington Post’s Lois Romano during his first presidential run in 1987. This is a statistic that sounds fake in the era of the modern 24/7 news cycle, but it isn’t.31

There is no doubt a straight line from the Washingtonian article to his unwillingness to engage with the media as president nearly fifty years later.

Biden would recall his infamous chat with Kitty Kelley, claiming that the young journalist “cried at my desk” after the intense reaction to the piece. “I found myself consoling her, saying, ‘Don’t worry. It’s OK. I’m doing fine.’ I was such a sucker,” Joe said.32

To his credit, Biden does occasionally have a way of cutting to the quick.

Part of Biden’s grieving process, it appears, was to embellish elements of the story of Neilia and Amy’s death to enhance his own personal narrative. In several speeches years later, he not only attributed the accident to the other driver, but he also falsely claimed that the man was drinking. At one point he said that “a guy who allegedly—and I never pursued it—drank his lunch instead of eating it, broadsided my family.” In another instance he said, “It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit—a tractor trailer—hit my children and my wife and killed them.” This statement was as dishonest as it was self-serving. The driver in question was not drinking, and was, in fact, not even responsible for the accident. Neilia had veered into his lane and did not heed a stop sign. Later, the driver’s family publicly stated that Biden’s statements were “hurtful and untrue.” Biden called and apologized to them after CNN “exonerated” the driver in an independent report.33

JOE GETS BACK UP

In his telling, the first time Joe Biden saw Jill Jacobs, the future Dr. Jill Biden, was in an ad for tourism at Wilmington Airport in March 1975. “She was blond and gorgeous,” he wrote in his memoir Promises to Keep. “That’s the kind of woman I’d like to meet,” Joe thought to himself.34 Jill, whose first marriage ended in 1975, had befriended Frank Biden years earlier at the University of Delaware. Frank gave the newly available Joe her phone number, and, according to author Ben Schreckinger in his book The Bidens, Joe “sweet-talked her into breaking a date” so they could go to dinner and a movie. Jill, a twenty-three-year-old college student who went through her divorce that very year, was a bit overwhelmed going out with a senator, particularly one who was a “natty dresser.” Still, Joe won her over at the dinner.

Jill had actually met Biden’s first wife, Neilia, in the 1970s. When Jill was a college student at the University of Delaware, she was married to Bill Stevenson, a Wilmington nightclub owner. He was an early supporter of Joe’s, and he and Jill attended the Bidens’ party on election night in 1972 at the Hotel Du Pont. After noticing how calm and staid Neilia was all night, Jill introduced herself.35

Jill was the daughter of a homemaker and a banker from Philadelphia. She was also the eldest of five sisters, and, like the Bidens, the Jacobs prized family loyalty. Schreckinger writes that she still “found the Biden clan intimidating.”36 But Jill turned out to be a natural fit and would eventually become the matriarch of the family we know today. When she and Joe tied the knot in 1977, she became a stepmother to Beau, then eight, and Hunter, seven, before she gave birth to Ashley Biden on June 8, 1981.

Intriguing biographical details in the ensuing years are few and far between. Joe had the job he wanted and was rebuilding his family. He tried to find ways to put a bit more money into his pocket, but unfortunately for him, he inherited his father’s willingness to engage in suboptimal business ventures. This is, as it turns out, a family trait.

In an effort to officially join Delaware’s elite society, Joe purchased a compound-like home that maybe one day would be the Biden dynasty’s equivalent of the Kennedys’ summer retreat in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. This would be the culmination of decades of Biden family striving.

When it came to the house, Joe’s vision has teetered on the verge of obsession. “The first thing you’ve got to know about Joe is the house. Probably the first thing he’d show you anyway,” begins Richard Ben Cramer’s profile of Biden in his 1992 political classic, What It Takes. The house in question was a sprawling, 1930s-era du Pont mansion Joe rescued from demolition in 1975. Joe’s dreams for that property never quite materialized, but he did manage to sell it, at a tidy profit, twenty years later, to an executive from MBNA, a bank that had been a major supporter of Biden’s.37

Things appeared to be on a relatively even keel for Biden, at least compared to his whirlwind first three decades. They got much more exciting in the summer of 1987.

THE WILDEST YEAR OF JOE’S LIFE

People wanted Joe Biden to run for president in 1987—smart people. Jill wanted him to run, too; even in moments when he got cold feet, Jill encouraged him to continue. “He wouldn’t leave the podium until he knew he had the connect,” Cramer wrote in What It Takes. He lived for “the connect.” That is the moment in the big speech when the orator has the audience eating out the palm of his hand. The statesman—now a showman—was making the audience feel exactly how they wanted to feel. Joe was hooked on that sensation like it was heroin, and he would chase that dragon all day long.

There was a big problem, though: he didn’t have a message, and everyone around him knew it. He decried the materialism and individualism of the Reagan era, which was drawing to a close, while trying to channel John F. Kennedy, according to the New York Times.38 This was a sensible approach. After all, Biden was a Democrat and only forty-four years old, just a year older than JFK when he was elected president. And they shared, to some degree, a certain preppy, youthful, Irish-American appeal.

Reagan bad. Kennedy good. Simple.

But what was his platform? His staff constantly quarreled over what the energetic and ambitious Biden should say when he was on the trail trying to make that connect.

They never found their answer.

By all accounts, the campaign was a hot mess.

Joe Biden claimed that he marched for the civil rights movement, which never happened. He claimed he was at Selma, which he wasn’t. In the very speech in which he announced his run, he quoted Bobby Kennedy—without actually attributing the quote to him.39 All of this is Bidenesque.

In 1987, the New York Times reported that in an August speech Biden made in Iowa, he plagiarized the words of the British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Kinnock began his speech: “Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?” Then, pointing to his wife in the audience, he continued: “Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Was it because all our predecessors were thick?” Biden began his speech by saying, “I started thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university?” Then, pointing to his wife, he continued: “Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest?”40

Cringe-inducing.

Biden mirrored Kinnock’s words, lifting lines verbatim, right down to the conclusion.

Kinnock ended his speech with the words, “Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what we had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”

And Biden: “No, it’s not because they weren’t as smart. It’s not because they didn’t work as hard. It’s because they didn’t have a platform upon which to stand.”41

Joe Biden speaks endlessly about the importance of his integrity as if the Bidens have an outsized amount of it. But he was living a lie. Now he had another plagiarism scandal. However, unlike at Syracuse Law, there would be consequences this time.42 His chaotic campaign was doomed. To make matters worse, his law school plagiarism had hit the news cycle at this point, making it all the clearer that it was time to exit the race.43

Yet this first presidential run was not without its silver linings. The most important of which is that had this presidential bid ever developed any “Joementum,” he probably would be dead.

Joe Biden suffered two brain aneurysms in February 1988.44 Biden wrote in his memoir, Promises to Keep, that he was giving a speech at the University of Rochester when he began to feel sick and lost his train of thought (more than usual). He later passed out in a hotel after feeling “lightning flashing inside my head, a powerful electrical surge—and then a rip of pain like I’d never felt before.”45 He returned home but was rushed to the hospital the next day.

He underwent two surgeries at what is now Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to treat the aneurysms, one in February and one in May. Doctors told him his chances of dying on the operating table were a coin toss, and if he were to survive, a full recovery was not guaranteed. A priest even read him his last rites. A doctor said that “the side of the brain that the first aneurysm is on controls your ability to speak,”46 which meant permanent loss of speech was a risk with surgery. After the ordeal, Biden’s face was partly paralyzed, but by August, he had recovered and returned to work.47

Had Joe continued on the campaign trail and had success, had he pursued that “connect” with audiences while traveling up and down the country for months on end, it may well have been a death sentence.

Ever since he was a boy, his family had imbued him with the mantra that there was a plan for Joey Biden. He had a destiny. In this moment at least, it’s hard to say they were wrong.

Joe Biden had saved his own life with his incompetent campaign.

The first presidential run was successful in at least one other regard as well: it solidified the political foundation that would undergird Biden for his entire career.

His sister, Valerie, managed the campaign, as she had his earlier Senate campaigns,48 but Biden’s political operation had also scaled up to include a number of bona fide professionals, many of whom are with Biden to this day. The 1988 campaign staff included future White House staffers Ron Klain and Mike Donilon, as well as Ted Kaufman and Mark Gitenstein, two of Biden’s closest confidants outside the White House.49 Polling prodigy Pat Caddell, who had burst onto the political scene as a twenty-one-year-old during Biden’s first Senate race in 1972, was also on the Biden bus. (Toward the end of his life, Caddell, who had a wide populist streak, would become a daily guest on my radio show, Breitbart News Daily.)

By 1988, Biden was a national brand with the professional political machinery to match his ambition, but it would be twenty years before he would try another run.

THE BORKING AND THE HIGH-TECH LYNCHING

Back on the campaign trail in 1987, Joe Biden had a major distraction that no doubt interfered with his ability to run for president: his day job. Biden was the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, and President Ronald Reagan had just nominated Judge Robert Bork to replace retiring Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell. Biden would have to lead the confirmation hearings.

This was going to be awkward.

First of all, Biden had been in the presidential race for only three weeks when the nomination came down. But more importantly, legally speaking, Joe Biden wasn’t fit to carry Robert Bork’s powdered wig.

Biden was a famously dreadful law student and an unaccomplished lawyer. His academic and professional careers are plagued by intellectual dishonesty. He barely even used the law degree he barely even earned. Nonetheless, he would seize the opportunity to become one of the most influential persons shaping the Supreme Court in the last fifty years.

Biden spearheaded the Democrats’ effort to stop Bork from getting confirmed. Biden initially indicated that he could possibly be convinced to vote to confirm Bork, but after meeting with the Federation of Women Lawyers and other interest groups, he changed his position. He would focus his attack on Bork’s positions on abortion and alleged civil rights illiberalism, but the true rationale for rejecting his nomination was that he was just too conservative. Liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe suggested a new criterion: “not fitness as an individual, but balance of the court as a whole.”50

“Balance on the court as a whole.” There is no constitutional mandate for a balanced court, but this baseless standard provided a rationale to torpedo Bork’s nomination.

The Democrats were successful in stopping Bork’s ascent to the court, making history by preventing the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, according to Washington Post columnist George Will, “on naked political grounds.”51

Ultimately, Anthony Kennedy was confirmed to the court in Bork’s place. In a vacuum, it was a historic win for Democrats; Kennedy often broke with conservatives throughout his Supreme Court career, including as the deciding vote in 2015’s landmark Obergefell decision, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country.52

Still, the victory certainly had its drawbacks. Borking became a slang term for smearing a nominee to the court and has become the go-to tactic to hold up conservative nominees ever since.

But Biden wasn’t at all troubled by his role in politicizing the court, as evidenced by the fact that he would try the exact same approach in 1991, this time with different results, when he led the infamous effort to keep Clarence Thomas from getting confirmed.

During that confirmation hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Biden, heard the testimony of Anita Hill, a former Thomas adviser who accused him of sexual harassment. The saga brought forth many embarrassing allegations used to humiliate and smear Thomas, a black conservative. Under Biden’s questioning, Hill testified that Thomas once mentioned a pornographic film star named “Long Dong Silver” to her and, at one point, asked her who had put a pubic hair on his can of cola.53

The claims were likely apocryphal—and even if true, they were hardly grounds for destroying a man’s name—but the images were lodged firmly in the public’s minds. That Thomas had overcome an impoverished childhood in Jim Crow–era Savannah, Georgia, to become one of the country’s most prominent jurists was no longer of interest. Who has time to talk about a man’s character and accomplishments when we haven’t solved the mystery of the rogue pube?

When Thomas finally had the chance to defend himself, he delivered one of the most searing statements in modern American history:

From my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.

Thomas was confirmed, but largely thanks to Biden’s “high-tech lynching,” he has been in the crosshairs of the Left ever since. The tactics Biden deployed against Bork and Thomas have become commonplace. They are designed not just to stop the confirmation of conservative and originalist jurists, but to personally humiliate them. Andrew Breitbart referred to this tactic as “the politics of personal destruction.”

In recent years, Biden has stated that he believed Hill, but Thomas and his wife claimed Biden called them after reading subsequent FBI investigative reports and stated that there was “no merit” to Hill’s claims.54 Of course, Biden would prove to be more skeptical of similar accusations later made against himself.

Biden’s playbook has been an enduring stain on the court. The same scheme was trotted out against Kennedy’s successor, Brett Kavanaugh, leading to an even bigger media circus than the one surrounding Thomas. When Senate Republicans blocked then president Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016, Democrats cried that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was playing politics with the court. But Biden and the Democrats had beaten them to it by decades. What’s more, the Republicans never turned Garland into an object of personal hatred in the way Democrats have done with Thomas and Kavanaugh.

Biden served thirty-six years in the Senate, and these twin Supreme Court nomination spectacles were certainly the most essential part of his legacy. The only close second would be the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was debated and passed in the mid-1990s. I explain and discuss the legacy of that controversial law in the final chapter of this book.

Biden himself would prefer if he were known for the Violence Against Women Act (passed in 1994 and renewed in 2022) or his role in progress toward peace in the Balkans (which he catalogs in excruciating detail in his second memoir, Promise Me, Dad ). But those did not have nearly the practical nor cultural effect as the borking of Bork and the high-tech lynching of Thomas.

Joe Biden came into the Senate as a show pony. Though he never became a workhorse, he did learn the machinations of Washington while he was there. This put him in a prime position to make that apparatus work for him, both politically and for the financial benefit of his family.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Threshold Editions
• Date d'édition: 2023
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 166804451X
• ISBN 13: 9781668044513
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 448
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible