Joe Biden speaks frequently on the campaign trail about his heated confrontations with dictators, gang members, and various world leaders, facing down powerful figures and hitting them with harsh truths — in private. His stirring accounts are a key part of his attempt to draw a contrast with President Trump, whom he has denounced for “embracing dictators” and having a “love affair with autocrats.”
1. Russian President Vladimir Putin
At a 2020 campaign fundraiser in Exeter, Pennsylvania, last week, Biden said he had told Putin during a private meeting at the Kremlin in 2011: “I look into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.'”
He gave a fuller account of the conversation in 2014: “I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’” he said. “And [Putin] looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.’”
The alleged conversation happened at the height of the Obama administration’s “reset” policy, which sought to repair the relationship between the United States and Russia. Whatever Biden told Putin privately, the two appeared to be on amicable terms in public.
While introducing Biden at a press conference during the visit, Putin described him as “distinguished Mr. Vice President, such an important person in the U.S. administration with clout.” Biden returned the compliment, saying, “I want to publicly, as well, thank President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin for their hospitality. We have very good meetings, very long meetings, and, I hope, productive.”
“In the second decade of this new century, the United States and Russia no longer have good reason not to trust one another,” Biden said. One month after the trip, Biden called Putin and invited him to visit Washington. “The vice president said he would welcome seeing Prime Minister Putin in the U.S.,” said a Biden representative at the time.
2. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević
Biden said he called Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević a “damn war criminal.”
According to Biden’s memoir, Promises to Keep, he met with Milošević in 1993 and told him, “I think you’re a damn war criminal and you should be tried as one.” In 2008, Biden aide John Ritch said he did not remember such a blunt statement but instead that Biden made the case more gently: “The legend grows. But Biden certainly introduced into the conversation the concept that Milosevic was a war criminal. Milosevic reacted with aplomb.”
3. President George W. Bush
Biden claimed that he questioned President George W. Bush’s leadership abilities during the Iraq War.
“I remember President Bush saying to me one time in the Oval Office,” Biden said in 2009. “‘Well, Joe,’ he said, ‘I’m a leader.’ And I said: ‘Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one is following.’”
The account was denied by Bush aides, who said the president did not hold one-on-one meetings with Biden. “I never recall Biden saying any of that,” former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told Fox News, adding that the statement did not appear among direct quotes from Biden included in meeting minutes.
“I don’t ever remember Biden being in the Oval [Office],” Candida Wolff, Bush’s White House liaison to Congress, said at the time. “He was such a blowhard on all that stuff — there wasn’t a reason to bring him in.”
4. President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela
Biden said he confronted the Venezuelan socialist leader Nicolás Maduro. In fact, it seems he complimented his hair.
During last month’s Democratic debate, Biden described having a run-in with the disputed Venezuelan leader. “I know Maduro. I’ve confronted Maduro,” Biden said.
The former vice president did meet with the embattled Venezuelan leader at an event in Brazil in January 2015, although photographs show Biden and Maduro smiling and laughing together during their brief conversation. Biden’s former aide, Juan Gonzalez, who was at the event, said Biden was smiling in the photos in response to Maduro’s unreasonable demands. Biden “laughed when Maduro asked him to raise the price of oil (market didn’t work that way) and that if he wanted to talk he first needed to release political prisoners and negotiate in earnest,” Gonzalez said on Twitter.
The Brazilian financial newspaper Valor described the conversation differently. The paper reported that Biden complimented Maduro’s appearance, telling him, ”If I had your hair, I would be president of the United States,” prompting the two men to break into laughter. Maduro later told the press that their exchange was “cordial.”
5. Alleged Delaware gang leader William L. “Corn Pop” Morris
Biden said he confronted a razor-wielding gang member named Corn Pop.
The former vice president has repeatedly told a story about a run-in he had with a violent gangster at a local Wilmington pool in 1962. The fight reportedly began after Biden, who worked as one of the few white lifeguards at an all-black pool, reprimanded a young man called Corn Pop for bouncing on the diving board and breaking pool rules.
Unfortunately, according to Biden’s story, Corn Pop was a dangerous gang leader who ran a group called the Romans. When Biden walked to the parking lot after work, Corn Pop and the Romans allegedly confronted him and threatened him with straight razors. Biden had come prepared for the fight by wrapping a metal chain around his arm. In the end, the two decided not to fight, and they became friends, according to Biden.
Corn Pop was recently identified as a man named William Morris. Although Morris has died, his son said that some relatives recalled that Biden had “some type of run-in or something with my dad.” He added that his father was a “good, kindhearted man who would do anything for anybody. He was always polite and respectful to everyone, that’s what he always taught me to be.”
6. President Gerald Ford
Biden has said he forced the president to pull out of Vietnam.
During a 2012 eulogy for George McGovern, Joe Biden recalled a confrontation he had with President Gerald Ford over pulling troops out of Vietnam. Ford had agreed to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which included then-freshman Joe Biden, to discuss the administration’s military funding requests during the fall of South Vietnam on April 14, 1975.
According to Biden’s account: “I said, ‘Begging the president’s pardon, but I’m sure if the president were in my position, the president would ask the president the following question.’ I swear to God, it’s in the transcript. And Ford looked at me very graciously, and he said, ‘Yeah?’ I said, ‘With all due respect, Mr. President, you haven’t told us anything.’ They were talking about Sector 1, Sector 2, Sector 3, and with that the president turned and said, ‘Henry, tell them.’ And that was the first time it was decided that we were not going to try to sustain our presence [in Vietnam],” said Biden.
But Biden’s alleged statement, and the response from Ford, do not appear in the classified minutes of the meeting, which have been released by the Ford Library Museum. According to the transcript, Biden did speak up at the meeting to oppose military aid to help evacuate South Vietnamese allies alongside the U.S. troops. “I am not sure I can vote for an amount to put American troops in for one to six months to get the Vietnamese out. I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out,” said Biden, according to the transcript.
7. Chinese President Xi Jinping
Biden said he made Chinese President Xi Jinping admit China owes its stability to the U.S.
The 2020 candidate recently told a Las Vegas audience about a tough conversation. “Xi Jinping asked me why do I keep calling us a Pacific power? I said, ‘Because we are’, and I looked at him, and I said, ‘Because your stability rests upon us being a Pacific power’ and he said, ‘You’re right,’” Biden said, according to a Sept. 27 pool report.
It is unclear when the exchange with Xi took place, but Biden has been telling a similar version of the story since as early as 2013. In the other versions, Biden does not say Xi told him, “You’re right.”
“When talking about the Pacific, Biden recalled a conversation with Chinese president Xi Jinping where the vice president was asked why he referred to America as a ‘Pacific power’,” reported the Capital Gazette in 2015. “‘Because we are,’ Biden said he told Xi. ‘And Mr. President, you owe your stability over the last 30 years to the United States Navy and military.’”
8. The Poroshenko administration in Ukraine
Biden boasted to the Council on Foreign Relations last year that he threatened to withhold foreign aid to Ukraine in December 2015 unless the Petro Poroshenko administration fired its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely viewed as corrupt. Shokin was ousted a few months later in April 2016.
“I looked at [the Ukrainian officials] and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours,’” Biden said. “‘If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
While Shokin’s removal was part of a wider anti-corruption push in Ukraine by the Obama administration, Trump and other Republicans have suggested Biden had another motive for taking on the prosecutor. Before he was fired, Shokin had at one time been conducting a criminal investigation into Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where Hunter Biden reportedly earned $50,000 a month as a board member.
Trump’s pressure on the current Ukrainian government to find out why Biden wanted the prosecutor fired spurred the current impeachment proceedings into whether Trump held back Ukrainian military aid to try to force the investigation. But the impeachment has also drawn questions about how Hunter Biden got such a sweet deal from the Ukrainians and whether his father viewed Shokin as a problem for his son that needed to be solved.
