Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden for president on Tuesday, NBC News reported.
"I am thrilled to be part of your campaign, to not only endorse you but to help highlight a lot of the issues that are at stake in this presidential election," Clinton said Tuesday at a virtual town hall with Biden.Â
"Joe Biden has been preparing for this moment his entire life. I've been privileged to work with him over the last 25 years," she added.Â
Clinton, who was secretary of State under President Barack Obama, was the first woman to secure a major party's presidential nomination, and she is the latest political heavyweight to cast an endorsement in Biden's favor.
She teased her endorsement in a tweet announcing her attendance at Biden's virtual town hall on Tuesday discussing the impact of the coronavirus on women.
Biden, the apparent Democratic nominee, accepted her endorsement in a tweet.
"I'm with her," he tweeted, echoing the signature phrase that Clinton popularized during her 2016 presidential campaign.Â
Clinton was the Democratic candidate that year who ran against President Donald Trump, just as Biden will likely do in November.Â
Her endorsement comes a few days after Biden received coveted support from other high-profile political leaders, including former President Barack Obama, with whom Biden served, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who dropped her presidential bid after reaching near front-runner status at one point.
Biden has built a near-insurmountable lead in pledged delegates after several key wins.Â
Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ran against Clinton in the 2016 presidential primary, also endorsed Biden for president after dropping out of the 2020 race on April 8. Sanders, the last candidate to oppose Biden, urged his followers to vote for him in the remaining primaries so he could pick up enough delegates to influence the party platform at the Democratic National Convention, which is slated for August.
Earlier this year, Clinton slammed Sanders as a political hack who supports sexist attacks against his rivals.
"He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him," she said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in advance of a docuseries profiling her.
"Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."