President Biden promised that “no one” from his “family and extended family” would be involved with his White House, pointing to the days of the Obama administration as an example.
The pledge – praised by establishment media outlets as a refreshing change from the Trump administration – was announced via a recent interview conducted by People magazine.
Sitting next to his wife, Biden professed:
“We’re going to run this like the Obama-Biden administration. No one in our family and extended family is going to be involved in any government undertaking or foreign policy. And nobody has an office in this place.”
But Biden’s claim that no one from his family worked in the Obama administration is patently false.
At age 26, Biden’s niece Casey Owens worked at the Treasury Department as a Special Assistant to the Senior Coordinator for China in the Obama administration.
She wielded considerable influence over the direction of U.S.-China relations between 2009 and 2011, as she described her team as “advising” former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and responsible for “coordinat[ing] the priorities within the agenda for the Dialogue” and “spearhead[ing] the negotiations of proposals.”
What’s more, an unearthed cable reveals Owens was part of the elite Strategic and Economic Dialogue II planning trip to Beijing as part of an economic with senior State and Treasury officials. And despite being out of the administration for five years, she attended the Obama administration’s final state dinner.
