A top adviser to President Biden has “emphatically” blamed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for undermining his reelection campaign and accused Democratic donors of ignoring the will of voters in the party’s primary by replacing Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris.
Anita Dunn, a former senior White House communications adviser who has now moved to Harris’ super PAC, blasted Biden’s skeptics in Congress and elsewhere in her first interview since the 81-year-old president dropped out of the 2024 presidential race.
“You know, some of the party’s leaders made the decision to go public, and that gave others permission to go public,” Dunn said. He told Politico Democrats are increasingly calling for Biden to drop out of the race after his debacle in the June 27 debate.
When asked if she was referring not just to “Senators and Representatives” but also to “Nancy Pelosi going on TV twice to restart the debate just when it felt like things were dying down,” Dunn quickly replied, “Absolutely.”
She argued that doubts about Biden’s candidacy by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders were “a key moment that prevented the Biden team from getting to a fight point.”
“And then Democrats made the decision to ignore primary voters and the primary process, and that was a donor-driven decision,” she added.
While Dunn did not directly mention it, he was likely referring to a New York Times op-ed by Democratic donor and Hollywood star George Clooney calling on Biden to drop out of the campaign.
The July 10 article, which former President Barack Obama reportedly knew about but did nothing to block, acknowledged that Biden’s lack of intellectual acuity — seen by millions of Americans in his debate performance with former President Donald Trump — was also evident at a campaign fundraiser that raised $30 million a few weeks earlier.
The same day the op-ed was published, House Speaker Pelosi appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and warned that “time is running out” to find a replacement for the Democratic presidential nominee.
Both pressure campaigns were launched after Biden made it clear in a letter to Congress that he had no intention of stepping down, and continued until he made a shocking concession on July 21, saying “it is in the best interest of the party and the country that I step down.”
Dunn also argued that the Democratic nominee’s unprecedented decision to halt his campaign and endorse a successor just weeks before the convention ran counter to the opinions of a “dial group” of undecided voters who assessed Biden’s debate performance and opinion polls.
“I’ve been getting a ton of messages from Republican friends lately saying, ‘your party is crazy,'” Dunn acknowledged, but denied it was a Democratic “coup.”
“They were like, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this. Our party is united. We’re going to fight it out. We have 24-hour news. His debate was awful, but we’re going to move on,'” she added. “They couldn’t believe what was going on here.”
She also blamed Speaker Pelosi for losing House seats to Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections, suggesting that “if some of our leaders had done a little better, we might have been able to control the elections.” [it] today.”
The former House speaker spoke glowingly just days after Biden dropped out of the race, calling him a Mount Rushmore worthy candidate, but in an interview this week to promote his new book, “The Art of Power,” he delivered scathing criticism of Dunn and other members of the president’s campaign.
“They won the White House. Great. But my concern is this isn’t going to happen. We have to make a decision to make this happen. The president has to make a decision,” Pelosi told The New Yorker.
“I’ve never been more impressed with his political activism,” she said.
A spokesman for Pelosi did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
House Speaker Pelosi said Monday that she and Biden have not spoken since Biden ended his reelection bid.
