A top adviser to President Biden is “absolutely” blaming House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for tanking his re-election campaign — and accusing Democratic donors of ignoring the will of their party’s primary voters in swapping him out for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Anita Dunn, a White House senior adviser on communications who has since departed for a Harris super PAC, inveighed against Biden’s doubters in Congress and elsewhere in her first interview since the 81-year-old president dropped out of the 2024 race.
“You know, clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public,” Dunn told Politico of the growing chorus of Democrats calling on Biden to abandon his run after his debate flop June 27.
Asked whether she was referring to “senators and House members” as well as “when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate,” Dunn shot back, “Absolutely.”
Pelosi and other senior congressional Democrats casting doubt on Biden’s candidacy were “key moments,” she claimed, that kept the Biden campaign from “reaching a point where we would fight our way through it.”
“And then you had this decision that the Democratic Party made to ignore their primary voters and ignore their primary process, and that was a very donor-driven thing,” she added.
Though she made no direct reference, Dunn is likely referring to Democratic megadonor and Hollywood star George Clooney’s op-ed in the New York Times calling on Biden to end his campaign.
The July 10 piece, which former President Barack Obama was reportedly aware of but did nothing to stop, acknowledged that Biden’s lack of mental acuity — which millions of Americans saw in his debate performance against former President Donald Trump — had in fact been apparent weeks before at a campaign fundraiser that raised $30 million.
The same day the op-ed was published, Pelosi went public on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and warned “time is running short” on finding a replacement Democratic presidential nominee.
Both pressure campaigns mounted after Biden had made clear in a letter to Congress he had no intention of stepping aside — and continued until his shocking concession July 21 that it was “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.”
Dunn also claimed that the unprecedented decision for a presumptive Democratic nominee to suspend a campaign — and endorse a successor candidate — just weeks before the party’s convention flew in the face of “dial groups” of undecided voters who assessed Biden’s debate performance as well as public polling.
“I had a lot of Republican friends who were sending me texts during this period saying, ‘Your party is insane,’” Dunn admitted, while denying it was a Democratic Party “coup.”
“They were saying, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this. Our party closes ranks. You know, you fight it through. You have a 24-hour news cycle. He had a bad debate, and you move on,’” she added. “They could not believe what was going on here.”
She went on to further blame Pelosi for losing the House to Republicans in the 2022 midterms, suggesting that “had certain leaders … done a slightly better job, maybe we would control [it] today.”
While the former House speaker gushed in the days after Biden’s departure from the race about him belonging on Mt. Rushmore, she also took a swipe at Dunn and other members of the president’s political campaign in an interview this week to promote her new book, “The Art of Power.”
“They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: This ain’t happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen,” Pelosi told the New Yorker.
“I’ve never been that impressed with his political operation,” she said.
A Pelosi spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Neither she nor Biden have spoken since the president cut short his re-election effort, Pelosi revealed on Monday.
