Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s newest article on the days leading up to Joe Biden’s announcement that he was dropping his re-election bid sure makes it seem that a coup was pulled off by a cabal consisting of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), former president Barack Obama, and more.
If you’re not familiar with Hersh or his work, he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre and its covered up, covered Watergate for the New York Times, and uncovered the CIA’s domestic spying program. In other words, he’s the type of serious journalist those inside the Beltway cannot credibly ignore.
After Biden abandoned his re-election bid a little more than a week ago and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris there were a series of articles at publications as varied as Politico, Daily Mail, RedState, and independent blogs with original information about the behind-the-scenes machinations and medical events leading to Biden’s decision to drop out. Hersh reviewed all of those and spoke with Washington insiders to create his own narrative of what occurred, which is the stuff of Hollywood scripts – or even crazier.
As Hersh writes:
It’s a story not unlike Seven Days in May, the Cold War thriller in which a colonel played by Kirk Douglas foils a coup staged by a general played by Burt Lancaster. None of what you read below comes from an official account by the White House.
Here are the key points.
Biden’s Staff, Donors, and Corporate Media all Covered up His declining condition.
While outlets outside of corporate media pointed out over and over and over again that Joe Biden wasn’t fully there cognitively, until Biden debated Trump in late June the (literal) party line was that Biden was fine, he had a stutter, and mean partisans were engaging in posting “cheap fake” videos that made his condition look worse than it was. Team Biden even pushed back the week before the debate when video from a massive fundraiser in Los Angeles showed Barack Obama having to lead a confused Biden off the stage.
After the debate, donors panicked. Hersh wrote on July 20, the day before Biden dropped out:
One donor told me that there was much anger among his East Coast group at Biden’s inner circle for their mishandling of the president’s growing disconnection. “Not one of the president’s key aides,” he told me, “ever said one word to the donors” about the extent of Biden’s disabilities prior to his revelatory debate with Trump last month. “It was as if the Democratic band was playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ on the deck of the Titanic.”
According to Hersh’s latest reporting the Democrat inner circle plan was to keep Joe’s impairment covered up, apparently until he was re-elected (emphasis mine):
It’s not surprising that the long overdue unraveling of President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign happened when it became impossible to keep his increasing impairment covered up. It was the big-time money backers of the Democratic Party who called off the game of see no evil, hear no evil, after Biden’s shocking performance in his June debate with Donald Trump. They balked at continuing to give millions of dollars to the party now that there was evidence that the president is not always there.
What was the end game, then? For Biden to be re-elected and for whomever is running the country currently to continue? Or for Biden to be re-elected and for Harris to take over when the decline was too big to deny? That doesn’t really make sense, since they could have had Harris invoke the 25th Amendment and take over at any point – unless they didn’t think Kamala could get elected on her own.
And it wasn’t just the higher-ups in the administration or the DNC who knew Biden’s acuity was failing. None of those so-called professional journalists with tons of sources inside the administration failed to report this:
Who in Washington didn’t know that Biden was failing? We all did, up to a point. I had learned months earlier from a federal official that those in the front rows of university events where Biden was speaking were warned not to move if the president tripped while walking to the podium. Secret Service agents were on hand to pick him up immediately. There would be no front-page photos of a college valedictorian helping the president climb to his feet.
Until that fateful debate.
Why? This line in Hersh’s latest sums it up:
“Fear of Trump took priority over doing the right thing.”
Hersh went through the days leading up to Biden dropping out, beginning with Monday, July 15, when Biden flew to Nevada. On the 16th he spoke to the NAACP and was successful in quashing some of the “He must drop out!” talk. On the 17th he was scheduled to give a speech to a Latino group, but after a meet-and-greet at a Mexican restaurant that speech was canceled, Biden’s motorcade sped toward the airport – and the President wasn’t seen publicly for a week.
Biden Left Las Vegas After a ‘Yet-to-be-Revealed’ Illness
Hersh writes (emphasis added):
The next day, the president, apparently stricken while campaigning with a yet-to-be-revealed illness, broke from his schedule and made a police escort race to Air Force One after initially telling police they were heading to the nearest emergency room.
The official story was that Biden had tested positive for COVID and had some symptoms, so was rushing back to Delaware to isolate. But everyone saw the writing on the wall, and the events in Las Vegas set off a cascade of events culminating just a few days later in Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 campaign. It didn’t help that Biden was unreachable:
That was the last straw for a core group of Congressional leaders, government officials and some senior Biden funders who were withholding huge amounts of committed contributions. “There was pressure on donors to come across on their pending commitments,” the official told me. “It was understood that Biden had a physical problem in Las Vegas and the family was saying no” to continued pressure from donors and senior Democrats in Congress to withdraw from the presidential campaign. Initially, the president could not be reached.
Why couldn’t the president be reached? This all lends credence to RedState’s reporting that Biden suffered a neurological insult along the lines of a transient ischemic attack. According to Hersh’s reporting, it’s still not known (by those he spoke to, at least) what type of medical event happened in Las Vegas:
By Saturday, July 20, former President Barack Obama was deeply involved, and there was talk that he would place a call to Biden. It was not clear whether Biden had been examined or just what happened to him in Las Vegas.
Harris Was About to Invoke the 25th Amendment
As mentioned above, Congressional leaders were involved in pressuring Biden for at least a week before Obama was “deeply” involved, and Politico reported that Pelosi had an arm-twisting meeting with the Bidens over the weekend of July 13 imploring him to drop out. But it was Obama who made the final move, on Sunday morning, July 21, according to Hersh:
“The Big Three,” the official said, referring to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, continued to be directly involved. “On Sunday morning,” the official told me, with the approval of Pelosi and Schumer, “Obama called Biden after breakfast and said, ‘Here’s the deal. We have Kamala’s approval to invoke the 25th Amendment.” The amendment provides that when the president is determined by the vice president and others to be unfit to carry out the powers and duties of his office, the vice president shall assume those duties.
Within hours, Biden made the announcement that he was out.
Kamala’s Endorsements Are Conditional
It was surprising that the Obamas didn’t immediately endorse Kamala, since they are known to be longtime supporters of the Vice President. Part of the reason their endorsement was delayed could be because of doubts that she could pull off a win, and apparently Harris was told that her ascension is not a done deal:
A key factor in the decision to force Biden out of office by invoking the 25th Amendment was a series of increasingly negative polls on the president’s standing against Trump that had been commissioned by the funders, the official said. “The downward slope was increasing.”
Polling would also be important for the vice president, I was told, and it was agreed that if the polls did not continue to show her gaining traction, other options would be considered, including an open convention. I was unable to learn if Harris was aware of such considerations or whether she intends to abide by them.
Indeed, polls in the time since Biden dropped out haven’t shown a huge groundswell of support for Kamala. She’s had a honeymoon bump, but a poll released Tuesday morning showed Trump at 52 percent.
Troubling Details of Kamala’s Indifference to Foreign Affairs
With trouble brewing in Venezuela, continued hostilities in the Middle East, and assassination threats against Donald Trump coming from Iran, among other issues, one would think that Harris would at least be interested in the President’s Daily Brief, even though her take on these world affairs would likely be much different than those held by us on Team America. According to Hersh, she doesn’t even care to hear about what’s happening in the world:
One possible drawback, I was told, was Harris’s sometime disdain for the work of the US Intelligence Community. She is known not to be especially interested in the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified summary of current intelligence that is prepared overnight by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and delivered by hand to the most vital offices in Washington, including the vice president’s. The document, which includes signals intelligence, is to be read by the addressee in the presence of the delivering intelligence officer. I was told that Harris often showed little interest in reading the document and at some point asked the agency to stop delivering it to her. Now, as a presidential candidate, she is being kept up to date on all significant intelligence matters.
Well, at least we can rule Kamala out as the source of leaks to Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other enemy on the world stage.
While Harris doesn’t seem to be the brightest bulb in the box in terms of traditional intelligence, she didn’t get where she is by being ignorant of how power is gained and maintained. She has to be aware of the axiom, “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” and how that translates to her current situation and the support and endorsements she’s enjoying. It can all be gone in a moment, according to Hersh:
The official, who has decades of experience in fundraising, told me that Obama emerged as the strongman throughout the negotiations. “He had an agenda and he wanted to seek it through to the end, and he wanted to have control over who would be elected.”
A few days after we talked, with Harris getting off to a solid start, Obama and his wife announced their endorsement of Harris and told her, over the phone in a staged TV event, that they would do all they could to campaign for her and to support her.
But she had better perform.
For Kamala Harris, the road to nomination at the DNC in Chicago convention is still a long one and filled with potholes and booby traps.
