Nancy Pelosi has admitted that she pressured Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race because she feared he would no longer make his own decisions.
Pelosi said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday that she intervened after Biden sent a July 8 letter to Congress reiterating his commitment to the election.
“I didn’t accept the letter as anything other than a letter,” she said. “It didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me. It really didn’t.”
In the letter, Biden said he was “determined” to stay in the race against Donald Trump, to avoid calls for him to step aside after his disastrous debate performance and increasingly poor poll numbers.
Pelosi’s admission follows Biden’s revelation last week that the former speaker was on his mind when he decided to hand over power to Kamala Harris.
Nancy Pelosi says a letter Joe Biden wrote to Congress in early July convinced her the president was no longer himself and should end his re-election campaign.
Pelosi said in an interview this weekend that she was influenced by the letter Biden reportedly sent to his fellow Democrats on July 8
In an interview with CBS on Sunday, Biden said he was “concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why Nancy Pelosi said [something] …and I thought it would be a real distraction.’
Pelosi and Biden, who have worked together in Washington, DC, since the late 1980s have not spoken since he withdrew from the race.
Pelosi said the timing of the letter irritated her as the president prepared for the NATO summit in Washington, D.C.
Two days after the letter was published, she appeared on Morning Joe and said, “It’s up to the president to decide whether he’s going to run. We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running out.”
Her suggestion that Biden had not yet made a decision despite the letter two days earlier was seen as a clear sign that she wanted the president to back down.
In her interview with the New York Times, Pelosi said that Biden had no hand in the letter, but that it was aides around him who were trying to drum up support.
She said of her TV intervention: ‘My main goal, though, was to say, “Stop saying things.” Because the president has NATO here. If you have something to say, save it for later, until they’re gone. Because this is a big deal — the top brass of ATO, which he’s strengthened, grown, and now hosts. And they’re doing great things, and he’s the center of it all. Save your comments for later.’
Biden sent the letter as lawmakers return from a July 4 recess, a time when calls for him to withdraw from the race have been mounting.
In it, Biden (81) lashed out at the press, donors and party officials, saying the party’s only chance is to throw him overboard.
“Let me put it another way. Some people said some people weren’t happy with the letter. I’ll put it in someone else’s mouth,” Pelosi added.
Biden spoke on Sunday about how Pelosi was among those pressuring Biden to step aside, along with other key party leaders such as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Adam Schiff.
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and the Senate thought I would hurt them in the election,” Biden said in his first interview since ending his re-election campaign.
“And I was concerned that if I stayed in the race, that the topic would be — you would interview me about why Nancy Pelosi said [something] “…and I thought it would be a real distraction,” he said in the interview with CBS News Sunday Morning host Robert Costa.
President Joe Biden wrote to House Democrats after a handful of elected lawmakers urged him to end his candidacy
Biden’s decision to engage Pelosi comes amid reports of ongoing tension. Senior adviser Anita Dunn, who is leaving the White House to join a pro-Harris super PAC, also addressed the pressure campaign in recent comments.
“You know, there were clearly leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave other people permission to go public,” she said.
Asked about rumors that Biden was furious, Pelosi told the New Yorker magazine: “He knows I love him very much. I’m praying so much. I’m crying so much.”
A growing group of Democrats demanded that Biden withdraw from the race after his disastrous performance in the debate against Donald Trump in June.
Biden said that if he had stayed, the race would have been razor-sharp — even though polls before he left office showed him trailing in every key state and in a tight but subordinate position nationally.
“The polls that we had showed it was a close race, it would have been close right up until the very end. But what happened was that a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I would hurt them in the race. And I was concerned that if I stayed in the race, that would be the issue,” he said.
Biden’s problems were on full display during his disastrous debate with Trump. Democrats, who had spent years downplaying concerns about the president’s fitness, were forced to confront them head-on. Many suddenly called for him to drop out of the race.
In the weeks following the debate, Biden scrambled to clean up the mess, but his efforts only led to more gaffes and mistakes, fueling concerns that the president could hurt the chances of other Democratic politicians in their elections.
