Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed a bombshell Wall Street Journal report on former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline a month after the California Democrat confided in friends that she was alarmed by how much he had aged, according to a new book.
“He was not the same Joe Biden,” Pelosi reportedly told a friend of the then-president’s condition after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom award during a May 2024 White House ceremony.
The claim is from author Chris Whipple’s new book, “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.”
Whipple wrote that Pelosi was “startled by how much the president had aged” after taking part in the ceremony, according to Fox News.
The White House event took place exactly a month before Biden’s dramatic decline was detailed in a Wall Street Journal report, where more than 45 Republican and Democratic lawmakers and staffers described a president who spoke so softly during meetings that participants struggled to understand him; did not appear to know what policies were in place; and relied on staffers to answer direct questions.
Despite privately voicing her concerns with Biden’s advanced age – he was 81 at the time – Pelosi publicly slammed the report as a “hit piece.”
“Many of us spent time with [the WSJ] to share on the record our first-hand experiences with [Biden], where we see his wisdom, experience, strength and strategic thinking,” Pelosi wrote in a June 5, 2024, X post. “Instead, the Journal ignored testimony by Democrats, focused on attacks by Republicans and printed a hit piece.”
Weeks later, Biden’s declining mental acuity was on full display during his disastrous June 27, 2024, debate against Trump — resulting in a wave of Democrats calling for him not to seek re-election.
At the time, The Post reported that Pelosi had played the “bad cop” to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer’s “good cop” in convincing Biden to bow out.
Other outlets reported that Pelosi threatened to release internal polling showing that Biden had no chance against Trump if the president insisted on carrying on.
“Pelosi believed Biden’s advisers were misleading him, showing him rosy poll numbers. She’d never been impressed by them; in her mind, they were an old boys’ club who talked only to themselves,” Whipple wrote.
The author claims Biden felt “betrayed” by Pelosi after she assisted in efforts to get him out of the race.
Pelosi’s office did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The former House speaker has blamed former Vice President Kamala Harris’ crushing loss to Trump in the 2024 election on Biden not exiting the race quicker.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she told the New York Times in an interview published last November.
Former first lady Jill Biden revealed earlier this year that it was “disappointing” to see Pelosi intervene in the 2024 campaign.
“We were friends for 50 years,” Jill told the Washington Post in January. “It was disappointing.”