President Joe Biden, who served as vice president in the Obama administration, reportedly considered resigning from his position amid disagreements with the administration’s policies regarding the Afghanistan War, according to individuals familiar with Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
Biden strongly criticized then-President Barack Obama’s decision to approve sending troops to Afghanistan in 20019, with the then-vice president saying such an act was a “strategic blunder” that would “bring [Obama’s] administration down.”
Demonstrating his anger with Obama’s decision, Biden considered leaving his post, according to notes he made in his notebook shortly after Thanksgiving in 2009.
Biden considered resigning vice presidency 'in protest' over Obama's Afghanistan policy: Hur report https://t.co/J2YV6ApbMU
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“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 down his administration down,” Biden wrote at the time. “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,” he added.
Biden was a strong critic of Obama’s decision to send troops to Afghanistan. The then-vice president’s anger over the matter was documented in Hur’s report, which contained a memorandum Biden sent Obama that “strongly criticized” the former president’s actions.
The Washington Examiner reported that the memorandum was among the classified documents found in Biden’s home in Delaware. In his report, Hur concluded that the president had a “strong motive” to keep the documents since they preserved the record of his opposition to the Obama administration’s decision regarding the Afghanistan War.
“He wanted record to show that he was right about Afghanistan; that his critics were wrong; and that he had opposed President Obama’s mistaken decision forcefully when it was made — that his judgement was sound when it mattered most,” Hur’s report reads.
“This evidence provides grounds to believe that Mr. Biden willfully retained the marked classified documents about Afghanistan,” it continues.
