Biden: ‘We Could Run Mickey Mouse Against This President and Have a Shot’
During a Tuesday interview that aired on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden suggested Mickey Mouse could “have a shot” against President Donald Trump.
MSNBC’s Willie Geist asked the former vice president as part of the network’s New Hampshire primary coverage if he agreed with Democratic strategist James Carville’s
assertion that the Democrats will give Trump four more years if they nominate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
“I refuse to suggest any Democrat can lose,” Biden replied. “I think we could run Mickey Mouse against this president and have a shot.”
Profile
in Corruption outlines how
Biden’s children and other members of his family did just that while he was in
political office.
Joe
Biden Helped Launch Business for Son-in-Law from the Oval Office, Repeatedly
Briefed Investors Privately
3 Feb 20202,194
4:58
Former Vice President Joe Biden went
to great lengths to boost his son-in-law’s health care company while in the
White House, briefing investors on the firm’s merits and even arranging access
to the Oval Office. The bombshell revelations are detailed in Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive
Elite — a new book by Peter Schweizer, a senior contributor at
Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
In June 2011, Biden arranged a
private meeting for two StartUp Health executives with then-President Barack
Obama in the Oval Office. At the time of the meeting, the company had been
around for only a few weeks. It had yet to finalize its business plan, let
alone develop a website.
The meeting was all the more
surprising since StartUp Health was not proposing any new or radical ideas for
health care, at least not to the degree of warranting a meeting with the
nation’s commander-in-chief.
“Their status as a health care
incubator was hardly unique,” Schweizer writes in Profiles in Corruption . “In
fact, there were thirty-one similar companies operating in the state of
California alone, and another eleven in the state of New York.”
As Schweizer outlines, the only
significant factor that set StartUp Health apart from others in its field was
that its chief medical officer, Howard Krein, was engaged to Biden’s daughter,
Ashley. Krein, a head and neck doctor by training, seemed to have become an
integral part of Biden’s inner-circle even before he officially wed into the family in June
2012.
One day after StartUp Health’s
executives met with Obama in the Oval Office, the company got a bigger boost
from the administration when it was featured at a health care tech conference
put on by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). How the company
managed to score HHS attention, while still in the stages of infancy, remains
unclear, but it is likely Biden played a role.
Regardless, the back-to-back events
gave StartUp Health a launch trajectory unavailable to other companies in the
health care field, let alone other industries. Biden’s influence ensured that
StartUp Health set out with “the winds to our backs,” as one of the company’s
co-founders succinctly put it.
The former vice president’s efforts
on his son-in-law’s behalf were not just confined to the company’s launch. As Profiles in Corruption details,
Biden went out of his way to ensure StartUp Health executives were given
unparalleled access to the White House during the Obama presidency. The
company’s leadership, which mostly consisted of Krein’s family and friends,
frequently met with administration officials not only in private but also in
public.
“According to 2011 White House
visitors’ logs, Howard Krein attended the China State Dinner, a White House
Staff barbecue, and President Obama’s Motown event,” Schweizer writes. “His
brother, Steven, had half a dozen other meetings with White House officials.”
Biden’s efforts on behalf of the
company expansively increased during his final year in office, both
internationally and at home.
First, the vice president took Krein
with him on Air Force Two to a conference on regenerative health hosted by Pope
Francis at the Vatican in April 2016.
“Conference attendees included a
who’s who of scientific researchers in medicine from around the world,”
Schweizer notes.
Then in May, Krein was tasked with
introducing his father-in-law at a major health industry data conference hosted
by the Obama administration. The opportunity provided free publicity to the
company as it planned to expand its portfolio.
In October 2016, Biden appeared
alongside StartUp Health’s CEO at the Cleveland Clinic’s Medical Innovation
Summit. During his remarks, Biden praised StartUp Health as an innovator in the
health care market and claimed companies like it would be essential to winning the battle
against cancer.
Apart from arranging access and
touting the company in public, Biden also took steps in the waning days of the
Obama administration to boost investment in StartUp Health. In January 2017,
Biden made one of his final appearances as vice president at a festival hosted
by the company in San Francisco, California. At the event, Biden lauded StartUp
Health’s success to 250 attendees, including members and prospective donors.
Ironically, at the same time he was
working to promote his son-in-law’s business, Biden was also claiming his
children had chosen careers unlikely to make them rich.
“I wish my kids would become
wealthy,” Biden told the International
Association of Fire Fighters in July 2012 while lambasting the economic
policies of then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Profile in Corruption outlines how Biden’s children and other members of his
family did just that while he was in political office.
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