Nancy Pelosi admitted that she pressured Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race because she feared he would no longer make his own decisions.
Pelosi, in an interview with the New York Times on Friday, said she intervened after a July 8 letter purportedly from Biden to Congress in which he reaffirmed his commitment to staying in the race.
“I didn’t accept the letter as anything more than a letter,” he said. “It didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me. It really didn’t.”
In the letter, Biden said he was “firmly committed” to staying in the race against Donald Trump as he sought to fend off calls for him to step aside following his disastrous debate performance and increasingly discouraging poll numbers.
Pelosi’s admission comes as Biden finally revealed this weekend that the former president had been at the forefront of his mind when he made the decision to hand power to Kamala Harris.
Nancy Pelosi says a letter Joe Biden wrote to Congress in early July convinced her the president no longer seemed like himself and needed to abandon his re-election campaign.
Pelosi said in an interview this weekend that she had been influenced by the letter, which was reportedly sent by Biden to fellow Democrats on July 8.
In an interview with CBS on Sunday, Biden said he was “worried if I stayed in the race, that would be the issue – I’d be getting interviewed about why Nancy Pelosi said (something)… and I thought that would be a real distraction.”
Pelosi and Biden, who have worked together at DC since the late 1980s, have not spoken since he dropped out.
Pelosi said the timing of the letter bothered her because the president was preparing to host the NATO summit in Washington DC.
Two days after the letter was published, he appeared on Morning Joe and said, “It’s up to the president to decide whether he’s going to run or not. We all encourage him to make that decision because time is running out.”
His suggestion that Biden had not made up his mind, despite the letter received two days earlier, was seen as a clear indication that he wanted the president to step down.
In her interview with the New York Times, Pelosi suggested that Biden had nothing to do with the letter, but that it was his staff who were trying to drum up support.
Speaking about his televised address, he said: “My main objective, 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 very important thing: the NATO summit, which he has strengthened, grown and is now hosting. And they’re doing great things, and he’s at the centre of it all. Save your comments for later.”
Biden issued the letter just as lawmakers return from a July 4 recess, where he has faced growing calls to drop out of the race.
In it, Biden, 81, criticized the press, donors and party leaders who have said the party’s only chance is to throw it away.
“Let me put it another way. Some people said that some people were not happy with the letter. I’m going to tell someone else,” Pelosi added.
Biden spoke Sunday about how Pelosi was among those putting pressure on Biden to step aside, along with other top party leaders like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Rep. Adam Schiff.
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought it was going to hurt them in the election,” Biden said in his first interview since ending his re-election campaign.
“And I was worried that if I stayed in the race that would be the topic… I would be interviewed about why Nancy Pelosi said (something)… and I thought that would be a real distraction,” she said in the interview with CBS News Sunday Morning anchor Robert Costa.
President Joe Biden has written to House Democrats after a handful of elected lawmakers urged him to end his campaign.
Biden’s decision to invoke Pelosi comes after reports of lingering tension. Senior adviser Anita Dunn, who is leaving the White House to join a pro-Harris super PAC, also spoke out about the pressure campaign in recent comments.
“It is clear that there were party leaders who decided to make it public and that gave permission to other people to make it public,” he said.
Asked about rumors that Biden was furious, Pelosi told the New Yorker magazine: “He knows I love him very much. I pray about it. I cry a lot.”
A growing list of Democrats has called for Biden to drop out of the race following his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June.
Biden said that if he had stayed, the race would have been very close, although polls before he dropped out showed him behind in all the battleground states and in a tight but inferior position nationally.
“The polls we had indicated that the race was going to be very close, that it would have been decided at the last minute. But what happened was that a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate thought that I was going to 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 struggles were on full display during his disastrous debate with Trump, and Democrats who had for years downplayed concerns about the president’s fitness were forced to confront him, with many suddenly demanding he drop out of the race.
In the weeks after the debate, Biden took it upon himself to clear the field, but his efforts only led to more gaffes and mistakes that raised fears that the president could hurt other Democratic candidates’ chances in their races.