They say the great thing about growing up behind iPhones is that our embarrassing moments weren’t caught on video—but that’s not true for Joe Biden.
Footage from his past just keeps coming back to bite him. And a new clip from 45 years ago shows the Democratic frontrunner making a jaw-dropping revelation.
The former vice president admitted that when he met with big donors to try to raise campaign funds, “I was ready to prostitute myself”–and he said it on camera.
The clip comes from a 1974 PBS show when the 29-year-old talked about his first race for national office.
Biden said when any candidate meets with big donors, “you run the risk of deciding whether or not you’re going to prostitute yourself to give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded to run for that office.”
Another panelist asked if that applied to Biden.
“I went to the big guys for the money,” Biden said.
“I was ready to prostitute myself in the manner in which I talk about,” he confessed.
Instead, he claimed that the money men turned him down because of his youth.
“They said, ‘Come back when you’re 40, Son.’ So I had to go out, I had to go out to a number of small contributors.”
So, Biden admits he was willing to sell influence in D.C. in exchange for campaign cash—the donors just weren’t buying. Not only was Biden a prostitute, but he was an unsuccessful one.
This would be ancient history, except that Joe Biden is still up to his old…tricks.
Biden huddled behind closed door with “at least half-a-dozen supporters” last Tuesday asking the “big guys” to write the biggest checks they can—because he doesn’t think he can raise enough money from small donors! That money will belong to Beto O’Rourke or Bernie Sanders.
Biden called this prostituting himself 46 years earlier, so what should we call it today?
That’s just the way Biden’s donors—let’s call them Joe’s johns—look at these private meetings.
According to CNBC, “a billionaire financier who spoke on the condition of anonymity” told the network, “I don’t want to give chits today for Joe. What’s my benefit?”
What’s my benefit? Where’s my quid pro quo?
Welcome to the real Democratic Party in 2020. And Joe Biden has done as much to make donors think America’s democracy is for sale as anyone.
Just before the 2018 midterms Biden praised a vulnerable Republican congressman named Fred Upton.
Biden singing the praises of a Republican? That didn’t make sense—until the dollars started adding up.
Biden only made the speech after receiving $200,000 from the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan, which receives is money from the Upton family.
As a senator, Biden worked out sweetheart deals for his donors—and vice-versa.
Biden’s top funder was Delaware’s credit card giant MBNA.
In 1996, Biden sold his house to an MNBA executive for $1.2 million—way more than similar houses in the area could fetch on the market.
Right after that election, MNBA hired Biden’s son, Hunter, as a consultant.
Hunter joined his dad in the world’s oldest profession, becoming a registered lobbyist in 2001—and his firm’s first target was dear old dad.
Hunter joined forces with William Oldaker, a former adviser to his dad’s presidential campaign, and the two lobbied then-Senator Biden.
The University of Delaware paid their firm, Oldaker & Biden, $1.5 million and raked in $24.8 million in federal grants and earmarks.
Hunter cashed in again while his father was vice president. Hunter traveled to China with his dad three times—and in 2013 he inked a $1.5 billion agreement with the Chinese government just 10 days after his dad left the country.
What did Papa Joe tell the Chinese to make them sign the contract?
What did China get in return?
Sometimes politics literally makes strange bedfellows. According to the campaign watchdog Open Secrets, the founder of “one of Biden’s top donors, law firm Baron & Budd…trial lawyer Fred Baron, acknowledged paying for former presidential candidate John Edwards’s mistress to re-locate.”
Other people say selling out for power is just part of Biden’s DNA.
David Limbaugh, Rush Limbaugh’s brother, wrote in his column that Biden “reached new heights of pandering” this month when he denounced himself as a product of “white man’s culture.”
“A politician so comfortable with prostituting himself should make people — even Democratic voters — nervous” Limbaugh wrote. “He has achieved the Olympic gold in cultural groveling.”
We shouldn’t be surprised he’s trying to sell himself to the highest bidder in 2019. Biden admitted he was for sale in 1974. The only thing that’s changed is the price tag.