Former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday that he noticed former President Joe Biden showing cognitive decline in April 2024 — but had no qualms about him holding the highest office in the U.S.
Axios’s Alex Thompson criticized journalists, including himself, for not seeing Biden’s decline earlier during his April 26 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) acceptance speech for an award for his coverage on the topic. On his podcast “Pod Save America,” Pfeiffer recalled attending a White House reception during WHCD weekend 2024, where Biden repeated himself and appeared diminished. (RELATED: After Democratic Panic, Harris Lines Up Softball Interview Tour)
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“He called me right before the election and I talked to him for like five, 10 minutes, and he was great. And I interviewed him before the election and he was totally fine … not even a question there,” Pfeiffer said. “And I had talked to a bunch of people who had gone to work on the campaign who had told me he’s great. Then we get to the White House and I didn’t see him again until White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend 2024.”
“I was at a White House reception and he was bad. He was quite bad in it. And he told the same story twice. He just seemed mostly old,” he added. “In no way did I look at that and say that man cannot do the job of president. I had real concerns that he could not do it for four more years.”
Pfeiffer also said he was worried that Biden would have issues running his 2024 reelection campaign. He said he brushed off Biden’s apparent decline at the White House reception at the time.
“I also thought to myself, ‘Well, it’s Friday, this is a super bizarre event, the night before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” he said. “I knew he was coming from speech prep and going back to speech prep on a Friday evening. Even [former President] Barack Obama was not a great communicator on a Friday evening.”
“I trusted the people who I talked to, who said he was fine. And I also believed — and I said this at the time after the [special counsel] Robert Hur report came out is — that if Biden really was having these mental lapses all over town, everyone would know it,” he added.
Hur issued a February 2024 report showing evidence that Biden willfully retained classified documents. However, the special counsel chose not to bring charges against the then-president because a jury potentially would have viewed him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden revealed memory lapses, including seeming to forget when he began and ended his vice presidency and the date of his late son Beau’s death.
While voters were long concerned regarding Biden’s mental fitness, and Republicans repeatedly raised doubts about it — including during the 2020 campaign — corporate media outlets consistently downplayed their legitimacy.
However, former Vice President Kamala Harris eventually replaced Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in July 2024 after his disastrous June 2024 debate performance against President Donald Trump.
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