Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday she never realized former President Joe Biden was declining in office, but argued that those around him who did know “should have acted” on it, Fox News reported.
Ms. Pelosi, California Democrat, made the remarks in an interview with Politico’s Jonathan Martin at the outlet’s California Agenda summit in Sacramento, standing by her account that staff and family closest to Mr. Biden bore responsibility for flagging concerns sooner. \
“There was the staff saying the family knew, the family saying the staff knew, I don’t know,” she said.
The former speaker also repeated her long-standing denial that she personally pushed Mr. Biden to abandon his 2024 re-election bid. She said she only raised concerns with him directly about his campaign’s polling and suggested he bring in outside pollsters to review the numbers, along with releasing results of a cognitive test to reassure voters he could handle a second term.
Asked how Mr. Biden responded, Ms. Pelosi described a quiet, one-on-one meeting she called “prayerful,” saying the former president maintained he was being tested daily in the job. She said she told him the public wanted to see more proof than that.
Fox News political analyst Guy Benson rejected the account as “non-credible gaslighting,” saying in a statement that “everyone with eyes and ears clocked the former president’s clear decline.”
The remarks land amid renewed scrutiny of what Mr. Biden’s inner circle knew about signs of his decline before his disastrous June 2024 debate — after which even former first lady Jill Biden said she thought Joe was having a stroke on stage. Author Chris Whipple’s 2025 book “Uncharted” reported that Ms. Pelosi was “startled by how much the president had aged” after a May 2024 Medal of Freedom ceremony — a month before she publicly dismissed a Wall Street Journal report questioning his fitness for office. Democratic strategist James Carville has separately argued that Mr. Biden’s failure to leave the race earlier cost Democrats the 2024 election.
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