Former vice president and many-time candidate for president Joe Biden is teasing yet another run for the White House, this time telling reporters that he will have a decision for 2020 by the end of the year.
As a testing ground for what would be his third official run for the White House on top of the many times he “explored” the idea, Biden has engaged in a growing list of appearances as he stumps for other candidates in the 2018 midterm cycle, NBC News reported.
Barack Obama’s VP told the media that he would not make any decisions about throwing his well-worn hat into the ring for the Democrat nomination in 2020 until after the 2018 elections are over. But he has not ruled out another try for the White House.
Biden ran a disastrous campaign in 1988 when he was derailed and bowed out early after confronting a series of plagiarism charges — not only in his campaign speeches but also in papers when he was in law school.
But the former Senator from Delaware has floated himself as a candidate for president or actually started a campaign in nearly every presidential election since 1988. He launched a second serious bid in 2008, facing down then-Sen. Barack Obama, but bowed out early again when he was not able to win enough primary voters to knock Obama out of the race. Biden garnered only one percent in the Iowa caucuses in 2008, and in all his attempts to run for the White House, he has never come close to winning the Democrat primaries.
If he were to be elected in 2020, he would be 78 years old and would be the oldest president on inauguration day in U.S. history.
Biden’s possible candidacy comes on the heels of evidence that he and his son, Hunter Biden, struck a billion-dollar deal with the Chinese government in an arrangement author Peter Schweizer calls a corrupt attempt at influence peddling.
Schweizer discovered the quite deal that Biden and his son made bringing the Biden scion a $1.5 billion deal with a China-backed private equity firm which invested in a Chinese atomic energy company indicted for “nuclear power conspiracy against the United States.”
“So [Hunter Biden and Devon Archer] get this $1.5 billion to invest, and what they are supposed to do is basically invest in companies that benefit the Chinese government,” Schweizer recently explained. “So just think about this for a second. This is the vice president of the United States whose father is supposed to be commanding American presence and power in the Pacific to deal with the rising challenge from China, and his son is investing $1.5 billion of Chinese government money.”
“But it gets even worse because another investment that they make is in something called CGN — China General Nuclear — which is an atomic power company,” Schweizer added. “They invest in this company in 2014. A year later, what happens? The FBI arrests and charges senior officials in this company with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States. Specifically, they’re trying to get access to something called the AP-1000 nuclear reactor that is very similar to the ones that we put on U.S. submarines. So again, you have the son of the vice president, a close aide to the secretary of state who are investing in a company that is trying to steal nuclear secrets in the United States. It’s a stunning story, and here’s the thing: none of this is required to be disclosed because they’ve figured out a way to get around these disclosure laws.”
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.