Special Counsel Reveals Why Biden Thought About Resigning As Obama's VP

Spencer Brown | February 09, 2024 1:30 PM

Among the other damning nuggets contained within Special Counsel Robert Hur's report on the investigation of President Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents after leaving office, there's the notable inclusion of then-VP Biden's own admission that he thought about quitting to protest Obama's Afghanistan policy.

Specifically, Biden opposed the counter-insurgency ("COIN") strategy being proposed by General Stanley McChrystal to surge tens of thousands more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Biden's opposition eventually culminated in a memo to then-President Obama which "contains information that remains classified up to the Secret level" and, along with other classified documents, was found in the January 2023 FBI raid of Biden's house and garage in Delaware.

Biden also took copious notes collected and reviewed by the special counsel about the then-VP's meetings with Obama and other senior administration officials, including one entry from Biden declaring "I don't want history to associate me with the adoption of a COIN" and fretting such a strategy would "define our Admin[istration] in history." Ironically, Biden's own Afghanistan policy would define him after the disastrous withdrawal with which Biden will always be associated.

Biden's last-ditch effort over Thanksgiving in 2009 while he and his family were in Nantucket led him to again add an entry to a notebook obtained by the special counsel:

Tomorrow the President is going to make a fateful decision regarding Afghanistan - as I sat looking out the window at the sea - thinking I should resign in protest over what will bring his administration down.
...
Although I obviously wasn't there I feel like this is what it must have felt like for Kennedy then Johnson in the early days of VTN [Vietnam].
...
I feel guilty and boxed in myself. Guilty for not having been more successful w/ the President - and staying.
Boxed in by knowing or at least feeling that my resignation would only harden his position and leave him with one less voice.

Ultimately, of course, Obama rebuffed Biden's advice and "in a speech at West Point President Obama announced the Afghanistan troop surge: an additional 30,000 American troops."