US President Joe Biden said that the American elections should be protected not only from external threats, as he spoke with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, but also from internal ones.
“We need to protect the elections not only from threats from the outside, which I talked about with Putin, but also from the threat inside,” Biden said in Philadelphia, speaking on the topic of voting rights.
Biden met with Putin in Geneva on June 16, after which they had a telephone conversation.
As Biden said, during his last trip to Europe, the leaders of the EU and NATO countries were interested in what would happen next with the United States. “In NATO and the EU, they asked if everything would be fine. The citadel of democracy, whether it will be OK,” Biden said. He said that the storming of the Capitol on January 6 was an unprecedented event. “I thought I had already seen everything, but I have never seen anything like this,” the US president said. “The world is wondering what we will do,” Biden said.
According to Biden, in 2020, American democracy was tested first by a pandemic, then by elections, but the country passed this test. He called for preparing now for the next test – the midterm elections to the House of Representatives of the Congress in 2022.
“The 2020 election has come under the most intense scrutiny,” Biden said.
