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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. “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.

“It was clear at this point,” the official said, “that she would get the nod”—that is, the support to run for the presidency in the November election. “But Obama also made it clear,” the official said, “that he was not going to immediately endorse her. But the group had decided that her work as a prosecutor would help her deal with Trump in a debate.”

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.

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.

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.

Dr Exiled wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 31, 2024 4:04 am

I find that if you don't believe a narrative you don't like hard enough, it becomes false to you, regardless.

Dr Exiled wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 31, 2024 4:04 am

I find that if you don't believe a narrative you don't like hard enough, it becomes false to you, regardless.

Moksha wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 31, 2024 4:39 am

The call for invoking the 25th Amendment has to come from the President's cabinet.