Joe Biden is trying to ride a wave of Obama nostalgia to the 2020 Democratic nomination. He’s using a favorite line used by his old boss, claiming that the White House was scandal-free for Obama’s eight years.
During a rally in Iowa, Biden told the crowd, “Know what I was most proud of? For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie.”
Joe Biden: “Know what I was most proud of? For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie.” pic.twitter.com/Yb8Mm8DdIC
— The Hill (@thehill) June 12, 2019
This is just a bolder version of a line Obama has used since he left office and parroted by media allies.
Of course, the claim isn’t true. Here are a just a few scandals and lies of the Obama administration.
“If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan” was a line Obama used again and again to sell the Affordable Care Act.
But in truth, approximately 4 million Americans received cancellation letters from their health insurance companies because they could not meet the very strict standards of Obamacare. And this wasn’t a surprise. Part of the design of Obamacare was to cancel plans the authors felt were inadequate. Even the left-leaning website, PolitiFact, deemed this their “Lie of the Year” in 2013.
Then, there was this: “We have excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”
Obama had declared in 2009 that “lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House.”
But he never kept this promise.
Three days into his presidency, Obama issued the first of many waivers to appoint William Lynn, a former lobbyist at Raytheon, to serve as deputy secretary of defense. By the time of that 2010 State of the Union claim, at least 40 ex-lobbyists were in his administration, most without waivers. In fact, a Goldman Sachs lobbyist was serving as chief of staff at the Treasury Department.
By 2013, it was reported that Obama hired more than 100 lobbyists in his administration from Microsoft, Fannie Mae, insurance giant Wellpoint, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Monsanto, Yahoo, Google, and others.
Those are simply two obvious lies that lay at the center of Obama’s administration. Then, there were the scandals.
The Veterans Affairs scandal
In the spring of 2014, it was reported that at least 40 veterans died while waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system. It was then discovered that there was a secret waiting list designed to hide lengthy delays in veterans seeing health professionals. The problem was further exacerbated when a VA employee in Wyoming was put on administrative leave after an email surfaced about “gaming the system a bit” to manipulate waiting times.
Libya
While the dominant scandal that plagued the Obama administration and the 2016 presidential election was the handling of the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post and CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, it was the illegal war in Libya to begin with that’s the real scandal.
Obama failed to get congressional authorization to militarily intervene in Libya, which was a violation of the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Act. Amazingly enough, when Obama was just a United States senator from Illinois, he said, “[t]he President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
But that’s exactly what Obama did in Libya — he acted unilaterally in a country that did not pose a threat to the United States.
The IRS targeting conservative groups
In 2013, an IRS official admitted the agency was aggressively scrutinizing groups with names such as “Tea Party” or “Patriots.”
It was later reported that the IRS stepped up this scrutiny against conservative groups starting in 2010 when applications for tax-exempt status surged. Conservatives charged the Obama administration with weaponizing the IRS against his political opponents. While the IRS held liberal groups under scrutiny as well, they were largely outweighed by the amount of conservative groups whose applications for tax-exempt status were denied or delayed so that they couldn’t participate in the 2012 election. Lois Lerner, who served as the director of the Exempt Organizations Unit in the IRS, resigned from her position and was held in contempt of Congress for her role in the scandal.
It would be one thing for Biden to compare his record on ethics and honesty with the Trump administration, but this categorical claim that the Obama administration had no scandals and also didn’t lie is, frankly, a lie.
