During a 2009 re-election campaign appearance for then-New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, Vice President Joe Biden told a crowd that he personally called Corzine for economic advice during the financially uncertain months between the 2008 presidential election and inauguration day.
Corzine, now a disgraced and scandal-plagued former Wall Street wizard, made international headlines this year when his brokerage firm, MF Global Holdings Ltd., filed for bankruptcy protection on October 31.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the president and I weren’t back there blaming Jon Corzine then,” Biden is seen saying on a video of the campaign rally, which surfaced in November. “You know what we were doing? We were on the phone calling Jon Corzine — literally. I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine, and said, ‘Jon, what do you think we should do?’
“The reason why we called Jon was because we knew he knew about the economy, about world markets, about how we had to respond, unlike almost anyone we knew … we trusted his judgment.”
Watch Joe Biden praise Jon Corzine:
Corzine’s advice, Biden told the crowd, led to President Obama’s first economic stimulus package, which allocated $862 billion in taxpayer dollars in a plan that the president promised would reinvigorate the American economy.
“What we heard from Jon is what we needed to do. What we needed to do: We needed a serious economic recovery plan,” Biden emphasized.
As New Jersey’s governor, Biden added, Corzine “was already moving in New Jersey on an economic stimulus package, before anybody else was. But Jon knew — Jon knew what other governors know but many didn’t acknowledge. That it wasn’t sufficient, no state was big enough. As strong and as wealthy and as powerful as your state, no state was big enough to be the economic engine for national growth.
“So Jon suggested, and laid out, and we talked a long time about what the elements of the recovery package, nationally, should be. We knew that without a national package it wouldn’t work, and Jon was right.”
As the video closes, the Democratic partisans in the audience are heard chanting, “Jon was right! Jon was right!”
In another video available on YouTube, a Corzine campaign ad from 2009 shows Obama stumping for Corzine and calling him “an ally with the Obama administration in helping us develop a national recovery plan.”
MF Global, Corzine’s failed brokerage, is the largest U.S. company to seek federal bankruptcy protection since 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 protection.
CME Group, the world’s largest futures exchange, said on Nov. 1 that the federal government was investigating MF Global for allegedly failing to segregate its clients’ funds from its own brokerage accounts. Business Week has reported that investigation is focused on the movement of approximately $600 million in MF Global client funds — funds that have not yet been recovered.
David is The Daily Caller’s executive editor. Follow him on Twitter