During a new interview with President Joe Biden on CBS’s Sunday Morning Show, the lame-duck president revealed more about his controversial decision to step out of the 2024 presidential race.
In the interview, President Biden fingered Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as one of the leaders of the pressure campaign to oust him.
[RELATED: Report Claims Biden Could Drop Out of Presidential Race as Soon as This Weekend; Campaign Denies…]
“What happened was, a number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races, and I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic. You’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say, why did someone. And I thought it would be a real distraction,” said Biden.
During the interview, Biden acknowledged that he left the race because Democrats believed he could jeopardize their congressional races.
He also acknowledged that the negative media coverage directed at him following his terrible debate performance influenced the decision because he did not want the entire rest of the race to be focused on calls from Democrats such as Rep. Pelosi for him to step down.
As numerous Democrats called for Biden to step out of the race, Pelosi remained publicly supportive, but it was widely reported that, behind closed doors, she was the driving force behind the campaign to replace Biden as the Democratic nominee.
As recently as last week, Pelosi denied asking Biden to step down and claimed that she never called other Democrats to facilitate a plan to oust the president, although she acknowledged taking calls from other Democrats about Biden’s chances.
Biden’s new interview suggests that Pelosi did tell him to step down but does not confirm her as the mastermind behind the plan to remove him.
On the same day that Biden delivered his first TV interview since he dropped out of the race, Pelosi was giving her own Sunday interview on The New York Times’ Ezra Klein Show.
The interview saw Pelosi making eyebrow-raising comments about the strange circumstances under which Biden rejected the Democratic nomination.
While discussing the letter—posted exclusively to X—through which Biden resigned as the party’s presumptive nominee, Pelosi acknowledged that it did not sound at all like something the President would have written.
“I didn’t accept the letter as anything but a letter. I mean, I mean in another, there are some people who were unhappy with the letter, let me say, some said that some people were unhappy with the letter,” said Pelosi.
“I’ll put it in somebody else’s mouth because it was a, I don’t even know. It didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me. It really didn’t,” she added.
The decision by Biden, or whoever actually penned the resignation, to announce that he was leaving the race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris exclusively through social media led to rampant speculation about what went on behind the scenes.
Theories ranged from suggestions that Biden had died while self-isolating with COVID to suggestions that Pelosi’s political machinations essentially forced Biden out of the race against his will.
Although reports of Pelosi’s plotting remain unconfirmed, her comments during the interview have added to the suspicion surrounding Biden’s exit.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="30025 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=30025">1 Comment
Yawn!!!