From Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Ukraine, and everywhere in between, President Donald Trump’s campaign says former Vice President Joe Biden has been lying nonstop about foreign policy in recent days in an attempt to revise history in his political favor.
The Democrat presidential frontrunner in 2020, Biden, has made a number of claims in recent days that are demonstrably untrue, ranging from false claims that the Iran deal during the Obama administration “solved” the problem of Iran to untrue claims that he was supportive of former President Obama’s decision to launch the 2011 raid that finally killed Osama bin Laden.
Matt Wolking, the deputy communications director for rapid response for President Trump’s re-election campaign, joined Breitbart News Sunday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel this weekend to expose several of Biden’s recent lies about foreign policy.
“What you’re seeing is Joe Biden is out there on the campaign trail trying to claim he is a foreign policy expert, and he claims that that is his area of expertise—which is really quite funny when you think about it,” Wolking said. “His own Defense Secretary under Obama, Bob Gates, said that he was wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades. So, now Biden is trying to rewrite history. He’s telling lie after lie to voters on a whole host of issues.”
LISTEN TO TRUMP CAMPAIGN OFFICIAL MATT WOLKING ON BREITBART NEWS SUNDAY:
Wolking and the Trump campaign before the show released a document demonstrating how Biden has in recent days spread six separate lies about his foreign policy record, all attempting to clean up what has been a political mess for him in the days leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries next month.
1.) Biden falsely claims he and Obama ‘solved’ Iran
At an event in Iowa on Friday, Biden claimed that the Trump administration had, regarding Iran, sparked an “extremely dangerous problem that our administration had solved and put on the back burner back on the table.”
The claim that Biden and Obama “solved” the Iran issue just is not true.
“He claims that with the Iran nuclear issue, he claims that he and President Obama solved the Iran issue and put it on the back burner,” Wolking said on Breitbart News Sunday. “But that’s ridiculous. President Obama himself admitted that down the road his nuclear deal would have allowed Iran to build the bomb almost instantly, moving the breakout time to near-zero.”
Obama did in an interview NPR in 2015 admit that his deal would not stop Iran from building a nuclear bomb, and that after the thirteenth year of that framework, Iran would be able to build one almost instantly.
“What is a more relevant fear would be that in Year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point, the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero,” Obama said of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the “Iran deal.”
But that’s not the only reason Biden’s claims that he and Obama “solved” Iran are untrue, Wolking said. When the JCPOA was in its final stages, Iran infamously took hostage ten American sailors and brought them to their knees. Wolking also detailed how Iran never stopped its militant aggression against the United States, continuing it for years after that deal, eventually leading up to the attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad in the past couple weeks.
“Of course, we all remember when the deal was being finalized Iran took ten American sailors hostage and had them on their knees with their hands up,” Wolking said. “Of course, the Obama administration and Joe Biden included treated Iran very respectfully during that whole situation in order to make sure that they could still get that deal done. After the deal was done, Iran continued its provocations against U.S. military assets—harassing ships, launching attacks through their proxies in the region against U.S. troops and Americans. Of course that all culminated over Christmas when an American was killed in Iraq. [They were also behind the embassy attack] a few days later.”
2.) Biden falsely claims he did not support ‘nation building’ in Afghanistan
At the end of December, in an interview with the Des Moines Register, Biden claimed he never supported “nation building” in Afghanistan:
When the military came along and said here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to unite this nation and nation-build. And I argued from the very beginning, there’s no nation building. There’s been no nation building there for five centuries. Five centuries.
But back during the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, in early October 2001, CNN reported that Biden—then the chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee—was developing a plan to “propose reconstruction” in Afghanistan after a then-eventual U.S. invasion.
Biden did not want to nation build in just Afghanistan, either: He sought to do so in several other nations in the region as well.
CNN reported on Oct. 3, 2001:
Sen. Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is expected to propose legislation for a long-term reconstruction and development plan in Central and South Asia following any military campaign against Afghanistan, an aide to the senator told CNN on Wednesday. The senator will propose the plan, similar in nature to the Marshall Plan’s reconstruction of Europe after World War II, in an effort to create an economic and social climate in which terrorists will not be able to operate, the aide said. The aide said the initiative would cover Afghanistan and the Central Asian countries, including Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, as well as Pakistan.
Wolking, in his Breitbart News Sunday interview, explained how this proves another blatant lie from the former Vice President.
“This was right before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, after the Sept. 11 attacks,” Wolking said. “Even before we had troops on the ground there, he was wanting to propose legislation that would rebuild the country after the war to create an environment where terrorists would not flourish—but it wouldn’t just cover Afghanistan. He was talking about a whole host of central Asian countries—Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan. It was a whole host of things. So this idea that he’s out there telling people that from the very beginning he did not support nation-building in Afghanistan is another lie.”
3.) Biden inaccurately claims he opposed the war in Iraq
Biden lied again in Iowa at a Saturday rally saying he opposed the war in Iraq from the “very moment” that now former President George W. Bush launched it.
Biden, who actually voted for the Iraq war on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2002, now is claiming that Bush misled him into voting for it.
Biden said on Saturday, according to Bloomberg News:
He [Bush] looked me in the eye in the Oval Office and promised me all he was doing was wanting to get the authority to be able to send in inspectors to find out if Saddam Hussein was hiding nuclear weapons. The president then went ahead with ‘Shock and Awe’ and right after that and from the very moment he did that, I opposed what he was doing and spoke to him.
Biden made similar claims in a debate earlier this cycle, for which he was vigorously fact-checked. One such fact-checker even noted how on the day the war with Iraq began, Biden publicly said he was supportive of the president.
“We voted to give him the authority to wage that war,” Biden said the day the Iraq war started. “We should step back and be supportive.”
Biden has come under serious scrutiny from all sides for his record on Iraq, with everyone from Trump to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont ripping him over it.
“Similarly, he’s also been talking about how he claims he opposed the war in Iraq from the very beginning,” Wolking said in his Breitbart News Sunday interview. “This is lie number three. Earlier this year, he started telling this story and he kind of got called out by all the fact checkers—FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, the Washington Post. At the time, Biden’s campaign claimed he misspoke. Now we know that was a lie too, because over Christmas and again this Saturday he told a version of the story where he voted for the war in Iraq but then decided to oppose it as soon as George W. Bush launched it. There’s really so much dishonesty coming from him. He’s having to run from his record.”
4.) Biden now falsely claims to have supported Obama’s 2011 raid that killed bin Laden
The fourth lie Biden has told on foreign policy in recent days is that he claims now to have been supportive of President Obama’s decision in 2011 to launch a raid that ended up finally claiming the life of Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Bin Laden had proved elusive for nearly a decade after the attacks, despite U.S. vows under two administrations to bring him to justice, but Obama finally got him in the spring of 2011—just before the 10-year anniversary of the deadly attacks that claimed thousands of American lives.
When asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy if Biden told Obama not to go after bin Laden in that successful raid, Biden falsely claimed “I didn’t.”
But Biden himself in a 2012 speech admitted that he told Obama “don’t go” when Obama went around the room and asked all of the leaders whether he should do it or not:
Obama himself, in a 2012 general election debate with then GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, confirmed Biden told him not to go:
Then-White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed Biden was “speaking accurately” when he told Obama “don’t go” on the bin Laden raid:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the eventual 2016 Democrat presidential nominee, confirmed Biden was “skeptical” of the bin Laden raid in her book:
As did former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta—who was at the time CIA director—in his book:
So did then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates:
But Biden, starting in 2013 and continuing through 2015 to the present day, has begun amending the historical record to reflect more favorably upon himself, now claiming he never told Obama “don’t go.”
Wolking said this history revision is more blatant dishonesty from Biden.
“Osama bin Laden, they killed him in 2011,” Wolking said. “In 2012, Joe Biden was giving a speech—and this is on video—he told the story about how President Obama went around the table with all the senior people including the chiefs of staff of the military and said: ‘What do you guys think?’ Biden said he told President Obama my suggestion was ‘don’t go.’ At the time, this was pretty newsworthy. Jake Tapper even asked White House press secretary Jay Carney at the time about it. ‘Is this true? He was against it?’ Jay Carney said he was speaking, that Biden was speaking accurately when he told this story. And then when President Obama was debating Mitt Romney in 2012, he even made reference to the fact that his current vice president, Joe Biden, did not support the raid to get Osama bin Laden. This was backed up by at least five other senior administration officials from the Obama administration—Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Bob Gates, Michael Morrell—and they all say Biden opposed the raid. Biden started changing the story in 2015. He repeated a different version of events just this past week when talking with Fox News’s Peter Doocy, who asked him: ‘Didn’t you tell Obama not to go after Osama bin Laden and launch that raid?’ He said: ‘No, I didn’t do that, I didn’t do that.’ Well, it’s on video Joe. You said it.”
5,) Biden now falsely claims he never supported moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem
After President Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—something the last several presidents of both parties promised but never actually did—Biden did an interview in November with PBS NewsHour in which he falsely claimed he never supported moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
“I wouldn’t have done it in the first place,” Biden said when asked about Trump following through on his promise to move the embassy, something Obama, Bush, and several other previous presidents promised but never accomplished.
Biden supported a number of pieces of legislation as a U.S. Senator that called for the embassy to be moved to Jerusalem, and in a 2008 interview as the vice presidential nominee in Florida Biden even admitted that moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem has always been his position and Obama’s position.
Biden said in that interview about moving the embassy:
That’s been my position for years, and that’s Barack’s position. Look, when Barack said ‘undivided,’ he was talking about that there can’t be physical barriers. People turned it around and said he’s talking about a divided Jerusalem. His point was you can’t have a Jerusalem that has any physical divisions. Jerusalem must be the capital of Israel. Whatever decision the Israelis make, that’s a decision we’ll support.
Wolking said this is yet another example of Biden’s dishonesty in an effort to attack President Trump.
“Another example of him running from his record. He supported this for many years,” Wolking said. “President Trump keeps his promise to the American people and does this, and proves the experts wrong in terms of the consequences of this decision, which was overall positive. Of course, Joe Biden then says he’s against it.”
6.) Biden claims ‘nobody warned me’ about conflict of interest with son Hunter and Ukraine dealings
Another recent foreign policy fib Biden has told came in early December, when the former vice president claimed that “nobody warned me” about a potential conflict of interest over his son’s business dealings with Burisma in Ukraine.
“Nobody warned me about a potential conflict of interest,” Biden said in an interview with NPR in December. “I never, never heard that once at all.”
It turns out that Biden’s office was warned about this conflict of interest, as State Department official George Kent testified that he did alert the vice president’s office on the matter during his testimony in the House Democrats’ impeachment push against President Trump.
“If you think about the story about how Joe Biden and then-Secretary of State John Kerry, who has endorsed Joe Biden, are now telling in regards to these recent questions about Hunter Biden’s role and who knew what when, it really just doesn’t pass the smell test, right?” Wolking said. “We now know that all of these senior administration officials at the State Department and elsewhere—including George Kent—were worried that Hunter Biden was engaging in a conflict of interest in Ukraine at the time that Vice President Biden was leading our foreign policy in that country at the time. So, we have George Kent who went to Joe Biden’s staff at the time, who said, ‘hey this is a problem’ and they just kind of brushed him off. Joe Biden claims he didn’t know anything. And John Kerry claims he didn’t know anything. But, it really just doesn’t pass the smell test. All these people were complaining about and raising red flags about this potential conflict of interest—nobody told the Secretary of State? Nobody told Joe Biden, the Vice President, whose son was involved? It just doesn’t pass the smell test.”
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