Dick Morris: Biden Must Know Hillary in Legal Trouble

Dick Morris / NEWSMAX

If the captain and the crew are running for the lifeboats, it might be the strongest possible indication that the ship is in trouble.

If Joe Biden runs for president, it would be the clearest statement that the FBI investigation of Hillary is serious, that the Justice Department won’t back off prosecuting, and that the President is unhappy with Hillary as a candidate.

These interlocking conclusions flow from a basic question: Why would Biden run against a primary candidate now getting 54 percent of the vote in a three-way field in one poll (ABC/Wash Post) and 49 percent in another (NBC/WSJ).

Biden finished third in both polls, at 15 percent in the ABC/Wash Post poll and at 16 percent in the NBC/WSJ survey. For Biden to risk a third defeat for president, he must know something we don’t.

According to Ed Klein, in both of his books, Blood Feud and Unlikeable, highly reliable sources from all three camps — Hillary’s, Bill’s, and Obama’s — indicate that the former Secretary of State and her husband believe that the email investigation by the FBI has gotten a green light from the White House. In fact, Klein quotes Obama as saying that the scandal is Hillary’s fault for ignoring his warnings and his policy against private servers.

Klein goes so far as to say that the Clintons believe that there will be an indictment but hope that it will not happen until after Hillary has clinched the Democratic nomination. The Justice Department will have a difficult decision to make if the e mails unearthed by the FBI show that Hillary broke the law by allowing classified information to be received, stored, or sent on her private server. There would be, understandably, a huge reluctance to indict the likely Democratic nominee, particularly if the only alternative is the unelectable Bernie Sanders.

The situation is reminiscent of 1973 when the Congress was reluctant to impeach President Nixon because it was afraid to leave the nation in the hands of then Vice President Spiro Agnew. When Agnew was indicted and resigned as VP, Nixon appointed Ford to fill his place and impeachment became possible.

The circumstances dictate that we see Biden’s candidacy in the same light. Biden is not just declaring his candidacy and entering a race in which he is a big underdog. He is providing the Democratic Party with indictment insurance, as surely as Gerald Ford protected his party in 1973.

But even without an indictment, Biden could well upend Hillary if — and only if — he got strong African-American support. In the most recent poll by John Mclaughlin and Associates, Hillary got 50 percent of the black vote to Biden’s 25 percent. Sanders got only 7 percent.

Blacks cast 25 percent of the Democratic primary vote. Only if they could be weaned from their loyalty to Hillary would Biden have a chance.

Enter Obama. Only the backing of the president could bring about such a transformation of the African American vote. Even if, at the time, people said Bill was the first black president, it took a real one to defeat Hillary among African-Americans in 2008. The conclusion is simple: Biden cannot win without Obama’s support and will not run unless he gets assurances of his backing.

If Obama supports Biden, he has to deliver the nomination to him. To fail to do so would be, in effect, to suffer a key defeat in his own party, a stain on his record as president that would be hard to erase.

Just think, for example, of the consequences for Ronald Reagan’s reputation if his Vice President, George H.W. Bush, lost the primary of 1988 or for Bill Clinton’s if Gore had been defeated by Bill Bradley in 2000.

If Biden runs, it will signal that he has checked things out and that all these chips are likely to fall his way. Otherwise running makes no sense.