Joe Biden called it “improper” for President Donald Trump for having his daughter and son-in-law hold positions in the White House, suggesting in a CBS interview Sunday that Jared Kushner is not qualified to weigh in on the complex affairs assigned by his father-in-law.
That assessment, which the Democratic presidential hopeful offered in a wide-ranging “60 Minutes” interview, ratchets up the rhetoric between Trump and Biden over each other’s adult children and family business affairs.
Biden told CBS that he doesn’t like “going after” politicians’ children, but he said none of his children would hold White House posts, even as he continued to defend his son, Hunter, against Trump’s charges that the Biden’s are corrupt because of the younger Biden’s international business
affairs while his father was vice president.
“You should make it clear to the American public that everything you’re doing is for them,” Biden said, according to a CBS transcript, when he was asked about Ivanka Trump and Kushner, her husband, in White House posts with significant policy portfolios.
“Their actions speak for themselves,” Biden said of the Trump family. “I can just tell you this, that if I’m president get elected president my children are not gonna have offices in the White House. My children are not gonna sit in on Cabinet meetings.”
Asked specifically whether he thinks Kushner should be tasked with negotiating Middle East peace agreements, Biden laughed. “No, I don’t,” he said. “What credentials does he bring to that?”
Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine and China remains an emphasis of Trump’s broadsides against Biden, a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. The younger Biden took a post on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm after his father became the Obama administration’s
point man on U.S.-Ukraine relations.
Trump’s focus on finding information about the Biden’s Ukraine connections is now at the heart of a House impeachment inquiry against the president. Ukrainian investigators have found no legal wrongdoing by either Biden.
Noting that, the former vice president blasted social media giant Facebook for allowing the Trump campaign to distribute online ads framing the Bidens as corrupt.
