Nancy Pelosi warned Joe Biden she was willing to go public with concerns that he’d lose to Donald Trump if he didn’t drop out of the race, according to a report.
The former House Speaker sent the message to the president the day before he announced on July 21 that he would abandon his re-election campaign, according to the Daily Mail. The outlet cited four sources with knowledge of the situation, one of whom also claimed a phone call took place in which Pelosi told Biden she’d also publish damning polling figures to support her concerns.
The warning amounted to an “ultimatum” for Biden to drop out or risk being trashed by Pelosi in front of the world, according to the Daily Mail. Pelosi’s office and the White House denied the longtime allies spoke on the phone, the report says. Pelosi has previously said that she did not make any calls before Biden quit.
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Biden only started drafting his statement announcing he would withdraw from the race after the warning from Pelosi, according to the Mail. One source described it as a “come to Jesus” moment.
After his first statement, Biden quickly released another endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him as the Democratic nominee.
The claims follow other reporting this week that Pelosi and Biden—who’ve been friends for half a century—have not spoken since the day the president axed his campaign. Pelosi last month started using her influence to try and get him to drop out, according to The New York Times, citing a person close to Biden as saying he was “unhappy” with how things went down.
Pelosi is currently promoting her aptly titled memoir, The Art of Power, and has used media appearances to address her relationship with the president. Last week, she was asked by The New Yorker if she thought their friendship would survive. “I hope so,” she said. “I pray so. I cry so.” She added that was losing sleep over the matter.
Biden himself mentioned Pelosi in a CBS interview over the weekend when discussing his Democratic colleagues’ fears that his continued candidacy for president would “hurt” them in other races. “I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic,” Biden said. “You’d be interviewing me about, ‘Why did Nancy Pelosi say…’ why did so—and I thought it would be a real distraction.”
Earlier this month, Pelosi used her own CBS interview to say that Biden knows she loves him “very much” and denied reports that she’d led the charge to get him off the ticket.
“I wasn’t the leader of any pressure [campaign],” Pelosi said. “Let me say things that I didn’t do. I didn’t call one person. I did not call one person. I could always say to him: ‘I never called anybody.”
“What I’m saying is, I had confidence that the president would make the proper choice for our country—whatever that would be,” she added. “And I said that: Whatever that [choice] is, we’ll go with.”
Pelosi later called Biden a “Mount Rushmore kind of president of the United States” and suggested he could be added to the national memorial.
