Former Vice President Joe Biden was heckled by multiple spectators during campaign stop in Milford, New Hampshire on Sunday, Fox News reported.
As he spoke to the assembled crowd, one critic shouted that Biden was “creepy” and told him, “Don’t touch kids, you pervert.” Meanwhile, a separate detractor began to call him “quid pro Joe,” in an apparent reference to lingering questions about his past conduct in Ukraine and that of his son, Hunter.
“I’ve released 21 years of my tax returns, how many has yours? What’s he hiding?” Biden hollered back, seemingly alluding to President Trump’s ongoing court battle to keep his tax returns confidential. Biden also defiantly declared, “This is not a Trump rally. This is a democracy.”
Problematic conduct
For years, Biden has been dogged by a host of allegations that he has acted inappropriately around women and girls, a fact which was clearly referenced by one of the more vocal attendees at the New Hampshire event.
In a 2014 book called The First Family Detail, author Ronald Kessler wrote, “Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude.” Kessler went on to add that female Secret Service agents assigned to Biden’s detail “find that offensive.”
When pressed earlier this year to acknowledge and apologize to several women who had accused him of inappropriate contact over the years, Biden merely suggested that he was sorry if anyone misinterpreted his intentions, but he did not express regret over the conduct itself.
Quid pro Joe
One of Biden’s New Hampshire hecklers appeared to be familiar with claims that Biden entered into a quid pro quo arrangement by virtue of having pressured the Ukrainian government to fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin while back when he was serving as the Obama administration’s point man in Kiev. At a 2016 Council on Foreign Relations event, Biden bragged that he had threatened to withhold American aid if Shokin wasn’t removed from his position.
“I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,'” Biden boasted. “Well, son of a b—h. He got fired.”
Shokin has said in a sworn affidavit that the reason Biden worked to get rid of him was because he has investigating possible corruption involving Burisma Holdings, the energy firm on whose board Biden’s son sat.
Anger issues
This isn’t the first time that Biden has encountered angry voices on the campaign trail. At a stop in Iowa, he was confronted by a man who accused him of using his political office to financially benefit his son.
“You…sent your son over there to get a job and work for a gas company that he had no experience in natural gas. …In order to get access for the president…you’re selling access to the president just like he [Trump] was,” the man said.
That caused Biden to lose his temper, and he responded by calling the questioner “a damn liar” before insisting, “That’s not true and no one has ever said that.”
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