While Vice President Kamala Harris may increasingly be talking and behaving like she is the one running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Joe Biden remains president and there remain plenty of questions as to whether he is fit for the role.
New reporting from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh does little to quell the concern. Instead, his latest piece paints an alarming picture of what led up to Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his 2024 reelection campaign and throwing his support behind Harris.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by Puck News’ Tara Palmeri and Semafor political correspondent Shelby Talcott to discuss Hersh’s explosive reporting that the president may have been threatened with the 25th Amendment and how Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi factored into the pressure campaign.
The Report
On Saturday, Hersh posted a new article on his Substack titled “Leaving Las Vegas” that explores “the last tortured days of the Biden campaign.” As he explained, the “long overdue unraveling” Biden’s 2024 run “happened when it became impossible to keep his increasing impairment covered up.”
That moment, he wrote, came after Biden’s “shocking performance” in the June 27 CNN debate. “It was the big-time money backers of the Democratic Party who called off the game of see no evil, hear no evil,” Hersh wrote. “They balked at continuing to give millions of dollars to the party now that there was evidence that the president is not always there.”
But the 81 year old was initially defiant that he would stay in the race – until, suddenly, he wasn’t. According to Hersh, that was at least in part due to the health scare Biden faced after testing positive for COVID during a campaign stop in Las Vegas on July 17.
In his article, he references reporting like that from Daily Mail senior White House correspondent Emily Goodin, who shared last week that “Air Force One was flying so fast” on that return flight from Nevada that she was “shaking” in her seat. She described Biden as “deathly pale” and “frail” and said those on board believed the president was having a medical emergency.
Hersh’s reporting, however, goes further. “He discloses, with respect, the thinness of this [report], but he says he has gone over reports of Biden’s tumultuous trip to Las Vegas last week,” Megyn noted. “And he says that he has been in touch, in the wake of this report and others, with a senior official in Washington who helped him fashion an account of a White House in complete disarray, culminating in the president’s withdrawal from the race.”
According to Hersh’s source, Obama was deeply involved in trying to get Biden out of the race and there was talk that he would place a call to his former vice president with the approval of Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Obama reportedly called Biden after breakfast and said Harris had given “approval” to invoke the 25th amendment. The forty-fourth president also apparently made it clear that he was not going to immediately endorse her for president.
The Pressure Campaign
While Megyn acknowledged that Hersh is seemingly the only person with this reporting and it is from a single source, she said it would be “a massive piece of reporting” if true. Palmeri said she is somewhat “dubious” of the allegations given what she has learned from her own reporting on the topic.
According to her sources, Obama “made a point of not requesting to speak with Joe Biden and “did not want to contact him,” she explained. Instead, Pelosi led the charge. “Nancy Pelosi was… orchestrating it,” Palmeri continued. “She was in contact with Obama, but they knew that Obama was not going to have influence on [Biden] because of the last time that they talked back in 2015 when he had convinced him not to run for office.”
Additionally, Palmeri said it was not just public bravado from the Biden campaign that he intended on staying in the race. She described the incumbent as “very, very dug in at that time,” but even rougher waters were ahead.
“I was told, though, that if he did not drop out by Sunday [July 21], that that following week was going to get increasingly nastier, especially from Hill leaders,” she noted. “There would just be an onslaught of lawmakers calling for him to step down, it would become aggressive, and maybe one of them would have said something like that publicly.”
She said Pelosi, Schumer, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries all would have been “hands off” in allowing members of the caucus to speak out freely against the president.
Regardless of the specifics, Talcott said all the rumors and reporting lead to the same conclusion. “It points to the reality that there was an intense pressure campaign to push Biden out and it was from Nancy Pelosi on downwards,” she noted. “He did not want to step aside, he had made that clear… but the pressure built and it was so big that he had no choice, essentially, in the end.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Palmeri and Talcott by tuning in to episode 850 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.