(Bloomberg) — President Joe Biden said in an interview he’ll decide whether to run for re-election after congressional elections in November, and he excoriated former president Donald Trump for holding classified documents at his Palm Beach, Florida home.
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“It’s much too early to make that kind of decision,” Biden said in a “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday. “What I’m doing is I’m doing my job. I’m gonna do that job, and within the time frame that makes sense after this next election cycle here, going into next year, make a judgment on what to do.”
Biden, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, has repeatedly attested to plans to run for re-election in 2024, despite his age — he will turn 80 in November — and low approval ratings. While the president reaffirmed his intention to run for office again, he also conveyed that the decision was not yet final.
“Is it a firm decision that I run again? That remains to be seen,” Biden said, according to a transcript of the interview. After interviewer Scott Pelley noted that Biden is the oldest president ever, Biden joked, “pretty good shape, huh?”
The president also pointed to election-law requirements that take effect once a candidate officially declares candidacy as reason to wait on a decision, saying that “all of a sudden a whole range of things come into play” if he were to make his intentions official.
The Federal Election Commission requires candidates to file with the organization upon official declaration and to follow its rules on campaign contributions.
Mar-a-Lago Search
Biden has, along with his aides, refrained from commenting extensively on the FBI’s investigation into classified documents held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. He said in the interview that he had not sought a briefing on the matter to avoid any suggestion he was involving himself in the probe.
But he described his reaction to seeing the FBI’s photograph of the documents retrieved in an August search.
“How that could possibly happen?” he said in the interview. “I thought, ‘What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?’”
It was just “totally irresponsible,” he added.
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