Biden made his comments during a campaign swing through Nevada after days of internal debate among his advisers over how best to refute unsubstantiated claims by the president that Biden improperly assisted his son Hunter’s business ventures in Ukraine and China.
He said the attacks on his family were an attempt by the president to divert attention from the widening impeachment inquiry into Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate him — and cited them as proof that the White House feared him more than any other Democratic presidential contender.
“Let me make something clear to Trump and his hatchet men and the special interests funding his attacks against me: I’m not going anywhere,” Biden said at the Truckee Meadows Community College here, according to excerpts released before the speech.
“You’re not going to destroy me,” he said. “And you’re not going to destroy my family. I don’t care how much money you spend or how dirty the attacks get.”
Earlier in the day, speaking at a gun safety forum in Las Vegas, Biden excoriated the president and jokingly pretended to mispronounce the last name of his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who has communicated with Ukrainian officials on Trump’s behalf.
He said there was “zero, zero, zero” evidence that his family had done anything wrong.
Biden’s increasingly bitter fight with Trump comes at a potential tipping point in the 2020 Democratic presidential race. Until recently, Biden had led in most national polls since he entered the field last spring.
But Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, fueled by a highly disciplined campaign, has surged in many early-voting states, and even Biden’s aides concede that he remains prone to missteps and gaffes. A Monmouth University Poll released Wednesday showed Biden locked in a statistical dead heat with Warren, who garnered 28% support from Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to his 25%, a difference within the survey’s margin of error.
Biden and his advisers have been alarmed by reports that Trump’s supporters plan to launch an aggressive advertising campaign to portray the former vice president, and not the president, as the person who acted improperly — despite the lack of any evidence to support that claim.
But Biden’s top advisers have been equally incensed by what they view as the news media’s willingness to air unsupported allegations by Trump and Giuliani.
Trump and Giuliani have alleged that Biden, as vice president, pressured the Ukrainians to force out a top prosecutor in order to derail an inquiry into a Ukrainian company that paid his son Hunter Biden. Biden was enforcing the demands of the Obama administration and other Western nations, who saw the prosecutor as corrupt.
On Sunday, Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield, two senior Biden strategists, wrote to several major TV networks asking them to stop booking Giuliani, accusing him of spreading “debunked conspiracy theories.”
Biden amplified that argument on Wednesday, urging reporters to regard Trump’s statements, and his tweets, not as fodder for controversy but as a dangerous “abuse of power” that included enlisting foreign leaders as allies in his reelection effort.
“It’s important to step back from the heated 24-hour news cycle and focus carefully on the larger story,” he said, according to his remarks as prepared for delivery. “It’s not about Donald Trump’s antics. It’s about what has brought Donald Trump, and the nation, to this sobering moment in our history — and to the choice facing us in 2020. What has brought us here is simply this: the abuse of power.”
Trump, he added, is “afraid of just how badly I would beat him next November.”
The president does not agree.
“I’d rather run against Biden than almost any of those candidates,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
This article originally appeared in
.