Former Vice President Joe Biden sits down with CNN's Fareed Zak Watkins to discuss his new job as President of the United States. Biden also talks about the 2020 election, impeachment, and why he doesn't want to run for re-election.
00:03:21.300And, and I think what has been helpful with the Gates thing was that all this information came to light and Gates jumped out.
00:03:29.320And, you know, Republicans, a lot of Republicans don't want to do their constitutional duty of advising consent.
00:03:36.540You know, we heard Tuberville saying like, you know, he can pick the best people, but you know, they have to, this is their responsibility.
00:03:43.980The people must hold these senators to account.
00:04:16.480I'll tell you, I thought Cash may be difficult because he's, you know, a strong conservative voice.
00:04:23.800And I don't know of anybody that's not singing his praises.
00:04:26.960The other day I was watching and Trey Gowdy, who's a moderate person and very smart and very respected in the party, he's Cash's biggest fan.
00:04:36.740He said, this is the most misunderstood man in politics.
00:04:57.740While he's in the process of firing an FBI director and bringing in Cash Patel, who is a subservient loyalist, he doesn't have to tell him what to do.
00:05:06.280He's not going to direct Cash Patel to investigate this because he knows if Cash Patel wants the job, then he will be investigating these people without me having explicitly telling him so.
00:05:17.360If you want to understand what's going on, think about the mafia.
00:05:22.440And again, the literature, historical literature on dictators talks about the relationship, Hannah Arendt talks about this, between the fascist leader, say, and the mob boss.
00:05:33.300So you hire the people who are going to get it, who already know what you want.
00:05:38.400It's a very familiar strategy we all know from gangster films.
00:05:43.540Um, I'm very relieved that they're not targeting the people who wrote statements for the January 6th committee and like myself.
00:05:52.280And, but, you know, it is completely, uh, this is all par for the course targeting opposition politicians and the media.
00:06:00.880And, and I worry it's being normalized by the media.
00:06:04.080They're just reporting on it as if it's normal.
00:06:06.320Did this suggest for all of those who want to believe that Donald Trump is somehow going to be a kinder, gentler version of himself, that the talk of retribution during the campaign was just so much bluster?
00:06:17.520Um, you know, that's just not the way it looks like now.
00:06:20.300He put, he's putting in Cash Patel at the FBI.
00:06:22.480If he's confirmed by the Senate, Cash Patel has been very clear.
00:07:03.280We have a country now that's overridden with crime, that has millions of people that shouldn't be here, that should be in prisons in other countries, that should be in mental institutions.
00:07:12.800We have drug lords being dropped into our country and told never go back to their country.
00:07:17.380I'm looking to make our country great.
00:07:19.460I'm looking to get, bring prices down.
00:07:21.120Because, you know, I want on two things.
00:16:15.320And claim your eligibility for your free silver today.
00:16:20.260It's striking what he's saying is the people who attacked the Capitol, who assaulted police officers,
00:16:25.700who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power, should be let out of prison.
00:16:30.160And the people who investigated that attack should be put in prison.
00:16:34.540And that's, I think, you know, it's pretty straightforward in terms of his priorities and his values.
00:16:40.660You know, look, a lot of things he just said there are not true.
00:16:43.940It's important to remember, for instance, that the vast majority of those who have been convicted of offenses on January 6th are no longer behind bars.
00:16:51.900Only a handful, really, are in that Washington jail he's talking about.
00:16:55.060Those are the ones who are convicted of the most violent of crimes, the ones who really hurt people on that day.
00:17:01.880So the people he's talking about actually releasing from prison are the ones who are the most violent of all.
00:24:16.340No surrogates are defending him in public and explaining his greatness.
00:24:19.860Second, his party is punishing him, to be sure.
00:24:22.780He did what he could to step over Harris's, all over Harris's campaign.
00:24:26.520But fundamentally, there are deep and ancient hatreds among the Democratic Party.
00:24:33.300And the political story in particular illustrates that the great divisions in the party are rooted in the fact they don't know which way to go
00:24:41.000because those divisions are not resolved, whether to stay hard left or make noises about going a moderate way.
00:24:48.920So, again, surrogates are absent, and people are telling Biden that he should just be upstairs watching reruns of The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote.
00:24:59.820Thirdly, and this is the key point, dangerous point, to improve his image with Democrats,
00:25:06.240the story, the political story in particular, again, is telling him he needs to get off his duff.
00:25:11.860He needs to do what he can to hurt Trump in the next 42 days.
00:25:15.880That means pardons, paroles, special classes for illegal immigrants,
00:25:21.440Trump, Ukraine, for example, thwarting Trump in Ukraine and elsewhere.
00:25:25.820So the story is telling Biden to get off his duff, get into action, to hurt Trump as much as possible,
00:25:32.800to help the Democratic Party, because today only Biden, for the next 42 days,
00:25:39.180and then the rhino Republicans in the Senate are going to be able to thwart Trump's agenda.
00:25:46.180So they're telling him to get going, work harder, do more to thwart Trump.
00:25:51.360Do you, my thesis that we've got him cornered in the fact that they do these blanket preemptive pardons,
00:26:00.920which are unheard of in American history, blanket preemptive pardons,
00:26:04.680we've got him, Amy Klobuchar and a lot of the more responsible Democrats saying,
00:26:09.280you can't do this, I'm not supportive, you're going to blow us up.
00:26:12.360But if they don't do it, they've opened themselves up for these legitimate and continuous investigations.
00:29:46.840Pritzker of Illinois, Jared Polis of Colorado.
00:29:48.800They formed this governor safeguarding democracy group, basically to kind of advance policies on a state level that can push back against anything that the federal government tries to do that could encroach, if you will, on civil liberties or our fundamental basic rights in this country.
00:30:08.960So your thoughts on that, whether that can be effective?
00:30:11.400Well, we'll see if it's going to be effective.
00:30:13.120Guessing whether it's going to be effective is not my academic purview.
00:30:16.120But we're going to see, as far as my job goes, universities, we'll see weaponizing Title VI against universities.
00:30:26.840We're going to hear talk of anti-white discrimination, maybe anti-Christian discrimination.
00:32:05.220That's the way you make a world in which these countries can't function, can't operate, because their best and the brightest have been sucked up by somebody else.
00:33:40.380And it's imperative that both Pete and Cash get confirmed, if nothing less than to send a message that President Trump is going to have the administration he wants, not the one that Mitch McConnell wants.
00:34:40.300And they're showing their hand that they know that they have.
00:34:43.400Otherwise, why would they want to issue these blanket preemptive pardons?
00:34:48.180Like, for example, to these Democrats, prosecutors and attorneys and judges, yes, judges, and other operatives who ran this illegal republic-ending lawfare against Trump.
00:35:03.180His top aides, you, Steve, and Peter DeVarro went to prison, his supporters on January 6th who were politically persecuted.
00:35:11.220That sounds like a criminal conspiracy against rights to me when you politicize and weaponize federal intel agencies and law enforcement against your political enemies.
00:35:43.060And then that led to the deaths of millions and trillions of dollars in lost treasure and years of human misery because of this experiment that Tony Fauci created called COVID.
00:35:58.100And so—and then you look at illegal immigration, these various officials in the federal government, the Biden White House, DHS, Justice Department, state governors, local officials, are illegally importing and harboring illegal immigrants.
00:36:16.140That is clearly illegal to aid and abet harboring or harboring or concealing illegal immigrants.
00:36:22.280And there must be consequences for this criminal activity because, as they told us for four years, nobody's above the law.
00:36:30.500When they went after parents outraged by gender chaos in schools, they sent the FBI after them and said nobody's above the law.
00:36:38.160When pro-life Christians were praying at abortion clinics, including a 75-year-old Christian who got sent to prison by the Biden Justice Department under the FACE Act, they said nobody's above the law.
00:36:52.960And if a grand jury, for example, in the Southern District of Florida indicts under conspiracy against rights, we can say that a grand jury indicted.
00:37:02.080So the charges are clearly legitimate.
00:37:04.660And then when these cases are heard before maybe Judge Cannon down in the Southern District of Florida and a jury down there in Fort Pierce, Florida, finds them guilty, we're just following the law.
00:37:15.240Mike, tell me about – you've been doing work now on the resistance.
00:37:21.680One of the fights they've got is Mark Elias, and there's many different fronts of this.
00:37:26.560You've got the governors, you have guys on Capitol Hill, you have the NGOs and the media.
00:37:32.040Mark Elias is one of the smartest guys they've got out there.
00:37:34.760He's taking a quite different tack than they tried the resistance in 2016 when we had 10,000 people outside of Trump Tower every day protesting.
00:37:47.520They almost shut down the inauguration, particularly the inauguration balls that took place by protest.
00:38:40.060It was a mistake by the American electorate.
00:38:43.820In 2024, Mark Elias understands that President Trump changed the Republican Party, changed the country, and actually won a decisive victory in 2024.
00:38:56.060And so Mark Elias wants to move the Democrat Party from organic resistance of 2016 to organized resistance in 2024, and that includes five points.
00:39:15.640They're talking about new institutions within the Democrat Party, revamping the Democrat Party for better coordination.
00:39:23.500They need to do a better job communicating with the Democrat Party.
00:39:26.520Mark Elias organizes because their brand is toxic.
00:39:29.720And the most important that Mark Elias talks about is using the courts aggressively to enact their agenda, being liberal judicial activists, not being principled, not caring about the political fallout, not caring about, you know, following a judicial philosophy.
00:39:48.980Mark Elias' judicial philosophy is winning power, earning power, and using power.
00:39:55.000Mark Elias' movement has accomplished some really important things, but that what we need now is really something new, what I've called the opposition, something much more durable and much more sort of long-term.
00:40:17.860Mark, like you said, the resistance movement wasn't a total failure.
00:40:20.800We saw really historic victories in the 2018 midterms, for example.
00:40:25.460A lot of that was powered by the resistance, by down-ballot liberals, Democrats, progressives joining together and making changes.
00:40:34.340What are some lessons we can learn from, you know, 2016 to 2021 as we prep for 2025 and beyond?
00:40:41.720Yeah, look, Paige, I think the first thing that we ought to learn from that experience is that resistance worked.
00:40:48.080You know, Donald Trump campaigned, among other things, on a platform of repealing the Affordable Care Act, so-called Obamacare, and he came very close to doing so.
00:40:57.920But it was the results of the resistance movement that kept that from happening.
00:41:02.540Like, you can thank, you know, the fact that you have your health care and that you have seen expansions to it to the resistance.
00:41:08.820The fact is that the resistance movement embraced the courts, and the courts played a very, very central role in preventing a lot of really terrible things from happening during Donald Trump's first term.
00:41:22.540People forget how many cases that Donald Trump lost.
00:41:27.200I mean substantive cases where he tried to pass bad policies and the courts blocked them.
00:41:32.480And that was a success of the resistance movement.
00:41:35.320You know, the resistance movement recruited, as you mentioned, down-ballot candidates and built the premise and the foundation for the 2018 election, which was very successful for Democrats and for Joe Biden winning in 2020.
00:41:52.020So I think there is a lot we can learn from the resistance movement.
00:41:56.140And central above those things is never give up.
00:41:59.640Don't allow Donald Trump to let cynicism reign.
00:42:05.840He wants you to think that you're powerless.
00:42:07.400He wants you to think that there's nothing that you can do.
00:42:10.360He wants you to think that resistance is futile.
00:42:12.800And the first thing we can learn is that resistance is not futile.
00:42:15.480Like I said, the second thing I think we can learn is that even when you don't have power in Congress and even when you don't have power in the executive branch, you still have power in the courts.
00:42:27.040You still have powers in the states, right?
00:42:31.900And so one of the lessons I think we learned from the resistance movement is not to discount grassroots organizations and the power they have, not to discount the courts, not to discount state-level actors.
00:42:44.560And I think that is going to be even more important as we move forward.
00:46:07.660Now, with this tape and his new organization, he's metastasized to be the overall because – and there's a gap there because Carvel and these guys are so clueless when you see them on TV.
00:46:49.260But he also does things that the American people will reject.
00:46:56.040For example, the American people do not like the extreme lawfare by the Democrats against President Trump, his top aides, his allies, his supporters.
00:47:06.980And that's very clear that the American people don't like that because this election was a referendum on that.
00:47:14.500The American people heard the allegations and evidence on all these lawfare cases around the country.
00:47:20.020And the American people rendered their verdict on November 5th.
00:47:24.120And it was a landslide victory for President Trump, 312 electoral votes.
00:47:48.300And when you do that, maybe we would have picked up more Senate seats than we did.
00:47:53.760Maybe we would have won Senate seats in states that President Trump won if D.C. insiders would have been a more bold, fearless, America-first populist movement.
00:48:07.980And so that's what President Trump is going to change when he goes to Washington.
00:48:12.280He's going to complete the takeover of the Republican Party and make us an effective party.
00:48:19.480And I think Mark Elias is trying to do the same thing on the Democrat side.
00:49:55.620When he weaponized the Justice Department and he went after his political opponent, me, he went after his political opponent violently because he knew he couldn't beat him.
00:50:03.960And I think it really was a bad thing.