Here’s Biden’s exchange with Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on Jan.

drone strike at Baghdad’s airport on Jan. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. There is renewed interest in Biden’s contemporaneous position on the bin Laden raid in the wake of Trump’s decision to target Iranian Gen. But if Biden’s account about his one-one-one advice to Obama is correct, he wasn’t fully forthcoming about his position when it served Obama’s reelection bid, and his various versions over time haven’t always comported with one another. We can’t confirm what Biden may have told Obama privately. That’s the version being seized upon by the GOP as a contradiction of Biden’s recent denial that he advised Obama not to go after bin Laden.īut Biden also - months later and ever since - claimed that in a one-on-one meeting with Obama immediately after the security council meeting, he told the president to “follow your instincts,” knowing that the president was inclined at that time to move forward with the raid. In the mid-2011 and early 2012, Biden recounted how he advised Obama during a national security strategy meeting in April 2011 to wait for further confirmation that bin Laden was actually in the compound in Pakistan before acting. In his initial recounting of the events leading up to bin Laden’s death on May 2, 2011, Biden portrayed Obama as a decisive leader who decided to move forward with the daring raid over the vice president’s advice. We wouldn’t go that far, but Biden wasn’t giving the whole story. The Republican National Committee immediately called it “an instance of Biden flat out lying.” Questioned by a Fox News reporter, former Vice President Joe Biden denied that he told then-President Barack Obama “not to go after bin Laden” in what turned out to be a successful mission to kill the 9/11 mastermind.

The Bidden by Ben Leech