Nancy Pelosi revealed the brutal reason she wanted President Joe Biden to exit the presidential race and admitted she feels guilty over the attack on her husband Paul Pelosi.
The Speaker Emerita has been on a TV tour to promote her memoir, ‘The Art of Power,’ which comes out on Tuesday. In her interviews, she’s been candid about Biden’s chances for re-election.
‘I was asking for a campaign that would win. And I wasn’t seeing that on the horizon,’ she told ABC’s Good Morning America on Monday.
But she denied reports that she led a pressure campaign to push Biden to exit the race.
‘The only person I spoke to about this was the president. Other people called me about what their views were about it, but I rarely even returned a call, much less initiated one,’ she said.
Nancy Pelosi revealed the real reason she wanted Joe Biden out of the presidential race
She also revealed she felt guilty about the 2022 attack on her husband Paul at their San Francisco home.
‘What was sad about my husband’s situation is he’s not very political. They were after me. And I feel guilty about his paying the price,’ she told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
She noted she didn’t want ‘families to feel at risk because someone in their family is engaged in public service.’
Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer during a break-in in 2022 at the couple’s San Francisco home. A federal grand jury found David DePape guilty of attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assault on the immediate family member of a federal official.
DePape was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Paul Pelosi testified during the trial that he was awakened by ‘a very large man’ with a hammer and zip ties on the day of the break in who asked ‘Where’s Nancy?’
When he told his attacker that his wife was in Washington, D.C., DePape allegedly said he’d have to tie him up and they’d wait for her return. Paul Pelosi sustained a fractured skull in the attack.
President Biden gave an Oval Office address on July 24 about his decision to exit the race
Nancy Pelosi said she feels guilty over David DePape’s attack on her husband Paul Pelosi
The former speaker has spent much of her interviews praising Biden for exiting the race. She even told CBS that he belonged on Mount Rushmore.
There are reports Biden is angry at her for her role in his ouster. Pelosi was working behind-the-scenes to try and calm panicked Democrats after Biden’s first debate performance, where he stared into space and struggled to answer questions.
Democrats were worried that, with Biden at the top of the ticket, they would lose the House, Senate, and White House.
Pelosi was said to be relaying those messages to the White House.
Publicly she always said she trusted Biden would make the right decision, a message she echoed in Monday’s interview.
‘I have the greatest respect for the president,’ she told GMA. ‘I think he will be one of the most consequential presidents in our country. I want him, his legacy, to be recognized, preserved.’
‘I wasn’t asking him to step down. I was asking for a campaign that would win. And I wasn’t seeing that on the horizon,’ she said.
She also explained what it takes to have a winning campaign: ‘Winning an election is a decision. You make a decision to win and make every decision in favor of winning, in terms of how you mobilize at the grassroots level and own the ground to get out the vote. How you have a message that is bold and progressive, but not menacing to the public. And how you have the money to do that, to attract that largely from small donors. And then the most important decision is the candidate.’
