DISINFO: Biden may have known something in advance when he talked about using the army to remove Trump
SUMMARY
Democrats and their allies are alarmed that the firing of top Pentagon officials by president Donald Trump may be preparation for a military coup. But was it actually the Democrats, and Joe Biden himself, who first brought up the idea of using the US Army to remove Trump from the White House, in case he lost but refused to concede. That was in June, much earlier than the election and the controversies surrounding it. What did Biden know at that moment to say that?
RESPONSE
The claim is a distortion of a statement uttered by then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in June 11, 2020. Asked in an interview if he had considered what would happen if he came out as the winner of the election and president Donald Trump refused to leave, he replied that he was encouraged after seeing former and current U.S. military officials speak out against the President's support for using force against peaceful demonstrators. “I promise you, I'm absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch”, Biden said.
All this is mixed with Trump’s firing of several top Pentagon officials and framed in a way to make Biden’s comments suspicious of knowing “something in advance”. But Biden was referring to this scenario only after President Trump had repeatedly attacked the mail-in voting process and accused it, without evidence, of being fraudulent.
This is part of a pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign on the US elections, aiming to seed doubts on the legitimacy of the result and to promote the idea of electoral fraud. See other examples in our database, such as claims that the result doesn’t matter because the real ruler is the Deep State; that the Guardian exposed how US Democrats exploited mail-in voting irregularities; that an oligarch-sponsored insurrection against the people will take place around election day; or that the US is on the verge of a civil war, and militias are only a reaction against government abuse.