h/t to A/C
I've been saying for months that Joe Biden never had any interest in running for President until the spring of 2019. The short timeline in Post #1 overlooks a significant event: the Ukraine elections in March and April of 2019.
Here's my guess at what happened:
1. Joe Biden left office as VP in January 2017 and knew his political career was over. He had no interest in running for President in 2020 for any number of reasons.
2. The infamous video clip from 2018 of him bragging about getting the Ukrainian prosecutor fired a few years earlier is actually a big piece of evidence in support of what I've said here. There's no way in hell even someone as dumb as Biden would go out and openly brag about that kind of crooked conduct if he had any interest in running for President.
3. The Ukrainian election was held in two rounds in March and April 2019. The first round was a general election (March 31st), and the second round was a run-off between the top two candidates (April 21st), since none of the 30+ candidates got a majority of the vote in the first round.
4. Biden probably panicked after Zelensky was one of the finalists in the preliminary round, since it was clear he'd be the overwhelming favorite to win the election in April (Zelensky eventually won the run-off with 73% of the vote), and would be an anti-corruption crusader in office. So he quickly cobbled together a "campaign kickoff announcement" for a campaign kickoff rally that ended up getting delayed multiple times and was then orchestrated as a pathetic, half-assed speech with several hundred union members in Philadelphia.
Biden probably figured that running for President would shield him from any accountability for his actions -- by either the U.S. or Ukrainian governments.
It has worked magnificently for Hillary, Biden, Pelosi, et al.
They should all be rounded up, their wealth stripped from them and put into "the stocks" on Pennsylvania Avenue for 3 months and then into Leavenworth for the rest of their miserable lives.