Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) struggled to justify her defense of former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity when grilled over it during a recent podcast interview.
“Do you regret saying that President Biden had a mental acuity, he had a sharpness to him?” Sam Fragoso, host of “Talk Easy,” asked the Massachusetts Democrat in an interview posted on Sunday.
“You said that up until July of last year,” Fragoso added, noting that Warren had backed Biden up until he bowed out of the 2024 presidential race.
“I said what I believe to be true,” Warren responded.
When Fragoso pressed, asking the senator if she believed Biden “was as sharp as you,” Warren paused and appeared to be holding back laughter.
“I said I had not seen decline … and I hadn’t at that point,” the senator claimed.
Warren argued that when she defended Biden, including immediately after his shockingly poor debate performance against President Trump, she had not seen any discernible difference in his mental fitness from the Biden she knew in 2021.
“You know the – the thing is, he is, look, he was sharp. He was on his feet. I saw him at live events. I had meetings with him a couple of times …” Warren rambled, before Fragaso interrupted her.
“‘On his feet’ is not praise,” the stunned podcast host told Warren. “‘He can speak in sentences’ is not praise.”
Warren, again, appeared to struggle to contain her laughter.
“Alright. Fair enough. Fair enough,” she responded, backing down from her defense of the former president and then changing the subject.
Biden administration officials and Democrats have faced criticism for allegedly covering up the former president’s mental and physical decline in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), for example, publicly downplayed reports of Biden’s cognitive decline up until the former president’s disastrous June 27 debate while privately expressing her concerns, according to author Chris Whipple’s new book, “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History.”
“He was not the same Joe Biden,” Pelosi reportedly told a friend of the then-president’s condition after receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom award during a May 2024 White House ceremony.
The White House event took place exactly a month before Biden’s dramatic decline was detailed in a Wall Street Journal report, where more than 45 Republican and Democratic lawmakers and staffers described a president who spoke so softly during meetings that participants struggled to understand him; did not appear to know what policies were in place; and relied on staffers to answer direct questions.
Pelosi, however, slammed the report as a “hit piece.”
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