Exclusive — Donald Trump on the Bidens: ‘It’s a Corrupt Family’
President Donald Trump told Breitbart News exclusively in the Oval Office last week that his general election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his entire family are “corrupt.”
Trump, the incumbent Republican, will face off against Democrat Biden in November. Biden, the presumptive Democrat nominee, will formally accept the Democrat nomination for president, thereby officially becoming the party’s presidential nominee at the Democrat National Convention on Thursday night.
In his Oval Office interview with Breitbart News last Monday, the president made clear that his opponent and his whole family are “corrupt,” as evidenced by not just Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings with the Chinese Communist Party and Ukrainian oligarchs, but also other Biden family members, such as Biden’s brothers, James and Frank Biden and more.
Trump started by ripping into Hunter Biden for the $1.5 billion deal he cut with the Chinese. Hunter Biden accompanied his father, then the sitting vice president, to China on Air Force Two. Then just weeks later, he secured a $1.5 billion deal from the Bank of China, as Peter Schweizer—Breitbart News senior contributor and Government Accountability Institute president—has exposed. Hunter Biden also had a deal through Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company, through which he made tens of thousands of dollars a month—even though he had never been to Ukraine before accepting the position. Joe Biden, as vice president, pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma while his son Hunter worked for the firm.
“Hunter Biden came away with $1.5 billion, of which he gets big fees on. It’s not a possible thing to do,” Trump told Breitbart News in the Oval Office. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t—nobody has done that. Nobody has done that. China doesn’t do that. But he walked away in ten minutes with one-and-a-half-billion dollars. He gets fees on it. Ukraine, the same thing.”
But Hunter Biden’s questionable international dealings were not limited to China and Ukraine. As Schweizer’s most recent book, Profiles in Corruption, released earlier this year exposed, Hunter Biden’s firms had deals that secured hundreds of millions of dollars in other deals with the Chinese and with the Russians and Kazakhs as well.
“Other countries,” Trump said, noting next that the whole Biden family has been in on the graft: “The same thing for the family.”
Trump is correct about that. Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption exposed Biden’s two brothers, Frank and James, for various questionable deals in which they each engaged.
Despite having no experience whatsoever, Schweizer revealed this year that Frank was linked to $54 million in taxpayer loans from the Obama administration provided to help with U.S. relations in the Caribbean. Schweizer also revealed that Biden’s other brother, James, was employed at a firm to which the Obama administration funneled more than $1.5 billion in contracts over the course of Biden’s time in the nation’s second-highest office.
“It’s a corrupt family,” Trump told Breitbart News of the Bidens. “It’s a corrupt family, okay?”
In addition to Frank, James, and Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, is exposed in Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption as steering millions of dollars to a consulting firm she owned during her stints in her brother’s two previous presidential bids as his campaign manager. What’s more, Biden’s son-in-law, Howard Krein, who is married to Biden’s daughter Ashley, launched a firm from the Oval Office and repeatedly briefed investors privately, as Schweizer exposed in the book.
The president’s comments came in response to Breitbart News asking him about Biden’s attempts to frame him as weak on China, something that is hard to argue given the president’s and his administration’s work on the issue. Nonetheless, Biden’s team has tried to flip the script against Trump on China, something the president laughed at during his Oval Office interview as he laid out his successes in holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable.
“Weak on China? He’s weak period,” Trump told Breitbart News. “Weak on China? China has never—they’ve paid us billions and billions of dollars. They were having the worst year ever that they’ve had in 67 years. Weak on China? Those guys were pathetic. If Biden got elected, they’d own the United States within a very short period of time. China would own the United States.”
Report: Democrat Says Barack Obama Warned That Joe Biden Could Still ‘F*ck Things Up’
Former President Barack Obama warned during the Democrat primary that his former Vice President Joe Biden could “f*ck things up,” an anonymous Democrat said according to a report in Politico.
The line was originally attributed to an anonymous Democrat source cited by Politico‘s Marc Caputo from a conversation the Democrat claims to have had with the former president about the 2020 primary. It suggests that Biden was not Obama’s first choice for the Democrat party’s presidential candidate in 2020.
“One Democrat who is neutral in the 2020 race and spoke to Obama about Biden’s gaffe-prone nature recalled the former president saying: ‘Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,'” Caputo wrote.
That quote was first reported in January, but was revisited in a Politico story last week by Alex Thompson recalling how Obama supported his formal rival for the presidency Hillary Clinton in 2016 instead of his own vice president.
As both Obama and Clinton speak Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention, with Biden set to formally assume the party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night, these rifts between the top Democrats seem particularly relevant.
Thompson’s piece noted that Obama himself formally declined to be interviewed for the story that includes the quote about Obama warning about Biden’s capabilities as a candidate.
Instead, Obama’s spokesperson provided a generic statement that said, “President Obama has been unequivocal in his respect for Joe’s wisdom, experience, empathy, and integrity.”
But Thompson did speak to several top former Obama White House officials, such as former Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, among others. Jarrett, in particular, has been working to smooth over any hard feelings from the past and back Biden, after the former vice president won the nomination.
Thompson also reported that Biden’s allies are still displeased with how Obama and his top aides anointed Hillary Clinton as his successor in 2016.
Even Biden was a little hurt by the actions of Obama’s team.
“I knew a number of the president’s former staffers, and even a few current ones, were putting a finger on the scale for Clinton,” Biden wrote in his political memoir after leaving office.
While Biden was still pondering a run for president in 2016, Clinton was figuring out how to stop him, Thompson reported.
Clinton campaign manager John Podesta estimated that Biden would run for president and even drafted opposition research on him, while negative stories about his career made its way into the media.
Biden himself wrote in his memoir that Obama “was not encouraging” about him possibly running against Clinton in 2016.
As Biden began exploring a campaign against Trump in 2020, the New York Times also reported that Obama “cast his doubts” about it in a conversation with Biden.
“You don’t have to do this, Joe,” Obama told Biden, according to a source familiar with their conversations, cited by the Times. “You really don’t.”
The August 2019 story, by Times reporter Glenn Thrush, also detailed that Obama believed Biden should not run in 2020, but became more active in his former vice president’s campaign.
In March 2019, Obama requested a briefing on the state of the campaign from top Biden aides
“Win or lose,” Thrush reported about Obama’s message to the team, “They needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not ’embarrass himself’ or ‘damage his legacy’ during the campaign.”
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