Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden was pressed to answer for his contradictory accounts of his role in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Biden, who years ago said he advised President Barack Obama not to carry out the operation, insisted to a reporter on Friday that this was not actually true, conflicting with accounts by several other top officials from the Obama administration.
“No, I didn’t, I didn’t,” Biden said before hopping on his campaign bus in Iowa.
The comment capped what appeared to be a brief interview in which Fox News’ Peter Doocey asked the former vice president questions related to the U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Doocey asked Biden if he would “pull the trigger” to use airstrikes to take out a terror leader if he had intelligence that could stop an attack against Americans, to which Biden replied by bringing up bin Laden.
“Well, we did, the guy’s name is Osama bin Laden,” he said before Doocey suggested that he told Obama not to do it.
Biden’s description of his stance of the decision-making process behind the raid on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, has changed over the years. In 2012, he said his advice was, “Don’t go.” By 2015, he had settled on saying he had privately told Obama to “go.”
Biden’s more recent version of events contradict the public accounts of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, former CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Obama himself.
Clinton, who was the Democratic Party’s failed presidential candidate in the 2016 election, wrote in her memoir, Hard Choices, that “I respected Bob [Gates] and Joe [Biden]’s concerns about the risks of a raid, but I came to the conclusion that the intelligence was convincing and the risks were outweighed by the benefits of success.”
In their respective memoirs, Gates and Panetta also claimed Biden opposed the operation, with the former going as far to say of Biden: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”
During a presidential debate with Mitt Romney on Oct. 22, 2012, Obama made it clear that Biden had opposed the raid, telling Romney that “even some in my own party, including my current vice president, had the same critique as you did.”
