Joe Biden is at it again.

The former vice president took another crack at whitewashing the Obama legacy in a CNN interview this week, claiming he and President Obama would not have allowed Russian election interference to happen on their watch. The insane thing about this is: Russian election interference most absolutely happened during the Obama years. Everyone accepts that at this point, and President Trump was one of the last to accept it.

Does Biden not know this? Is he lying and hoping no one notices? Is he just having a senior moment?

CNN’s Chris Cuomo kicked things off by noting that President Trump “says he’s gotten NATO to give in more money for their defense because of his tactics.”

“Oh, come on, man,” Biden scoffed indignantly. “And by the way, the idea that NATO thinks — let me put it this way: If he wins reelection, I promise you, there’ll be no NATO in four years, or five years.”

Cuomo asked, “You think there’ll be no more NATO if he’s reelected?”

“No more NATO,” said Biden.

The 2020 Democratic front-runner then veered off.

“Look at what’s happening with Putin,” said Biden. “While he — while Putin is trying to undo our elections, he is undoing elections in Europe. Look what’s happening in Hungary. Look what’s happening in Poland."

He added, "Look what’s happening. Do you think that would happen on my watch or Barack’s watch? You can’t answer that, but I promise you, it wouldn’t have, and it didn’t.”

In what version of reality is Biden living? Russia has been screwing with foreign elections for decades. It is well-documented. It is not new. Political scientists Lucan Ahmad Way and Adam Casey explained last year for the Washington Post’s the Monkey Cage blog:

Shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Russia began to interfere in elections of the countries that had been part of the U.S.S.R. Many observers have argued that Russia sought to promote authoritarianism. In fact, its goal wasn’t primarily to undermine democracy but to support pro-Russian candidates. Indeed, in some cases, as in Ukraine in 1994, Russia inadvertently bolstered pluralism by trying to undermine anti-Russian autocrats.



Russian interference also frequently failed. Despite Russia’s power in the region, only four of 11 cases of interference turned out in Russia’s favor. Only once — in Ukraine in 1994 — is there plausible evidence that Russian intervention was decisive. There, Russian television gave the pro-Russian opposition candidate for Ukraine’s presidency significant media exposure that he would have otherwise lacked.

Then there are Russia’s post-2014 efforts to disrupt national elections, which Way and Casey call the “second wave":

In the past three years, Russian interference has expanded into such countries as the United States, Germany, France and Britain, among others. These efforts have ranged widely. For instance, to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO, the Kremlin likely sponsored an October 2016 coup attempt. In a number of European countries, Russia helped fund far-right parties such as the National Front in the run-up to France’s 2017 election. Russia waged disinformation campaigns in other countries. In the United States’ 2016 election, that included creating fake Facebook accounts that may have reached as many as 126 million Americans; disseminating leaked emails and fake documents to WikiLeaks; and launching cyberattacks targeting state voting registration systems. And in Norway and Germany, Russia launched phishing attacks against parties and campaigns.

Special counsel Robert Mueller and the U.S. intelligence community have concluded also that Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election specifically dates back to the Obama administration.

Biden cannot possibly be this ignorant about what went on during the years he served as vice president. Well, then again, let's think about this. Though it seems unfathomable that the man who served as second-in-command to President Obama would be so uninformed about Russia's efforts to upset foreign elections, it is worth remembering that Biden is the same person who sneered in 2012 when GOP nominee Mitt Romney warned that Russia is the U.S.’ greatest geopolitical foe: “These debates have exposed that Gov. Romney and Paul Ryan have a foreign policy right out of the ’80s, a social policy out of the ’50s."

“These debates have exposed that Gov. Romney and Paul Ryan have a foreign policy right out of the ’80s, a social policy out of the ’50s.” — Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 24, 2012

Maybe Biden is just that ignorant. Then again, he is also a shameless liar.

Straight ignorance or an outright falsehood? Perhaps the answer here lies somewhere in the middle.