Valerie Biden Owens in a new interview on Monday said former President Trump is “very intent” on taking down her brother, President Biden.
Owens, who ran Biden’s Senate campaigns and served as a senior adviser on his presidential campaign, told CBS’s Gayle King on Monday that she knew the 2020 campaign would be vicious and “was not disappointed.”
“The only race that I wasn’t enthusiastic about Joe getting involved in was the 2020 presidency because I was expecting, and was not disappointed, that it would be ugly and mean and would be an attack on my brother Joe personally and professionally because the former president is very intent on bringing my brother down,” said Owens, who is promoting her new memoir “Growing Up Biden.”
“I assume that from the beginning the former president and his entourage would attack my brother by going and attacking the family,” Owens continued, noting attacks on Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son.
“Hunter has written in exquisite detail about his struggle with addiction, his walk through hell, and I am so grateful he has been able to walk out of hell, but I don’t think there’s a family in this country who hasn’t tasted it,” she said.
Throughout the 2020 race, Trump launched personal attacks against Joe Biden, calling him “Sleepy Joe” and calling into question his age and cognitive abilities. He also attacked Hunter Biden for struggling with substance abuse and mental health and raised ethics questions connected to Hunter Biden’s government relations work.
Hunter Biden is facing an ongoing federal investigation into his tax affairs and foreign business dealings, which helped kick off Trump’s first impeachment after he urged Ukraine to launch an investigation into Hunter Biden.
Trump is now actively flirting with a third presidential campaign.
In a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released in late March, Trump led Biden in a hypothetical match-up.