Biden aide who fled to Kamala camp blames 'horrible attacks' from Democrats, press for his quitting election

In a recent interview with Politico Playbook’s Deep Dive Podcast, former Biden senior advisor Anita Dunn, who recently left the White House to join the pro-Kamala Harris Super PAC Future Forward as a consultant, spoke on the fallout of the June presidential debate that led to Biden dropping out of the race in July.

Dunn said that the debate was "bad," but " it didn’t feel catastrophic at all, certainly in terms of voters," adding that there wasn’t "much movement whatsoever" in polling immediately after the debate.



"What did change it was 24 days of unremitting negative, horrible attacks on Joe Biden."

These attacks, she said, came both "from his own party and from the press." She said "we were seeing an environment in the press that was just unremittingly negative. And nobody was covering Trump whatsoever. I mean, Donald Trump was out there doing and saying whatever he wanted to do and the press was like, 'We don’t care.’"

At the same time, Dunn said, "Clearly there were leaders of the party who decided to go ahead and go very public. And that gave permission to other people to go public."

Politico’s Ryan Lizza responded, "Are you talking about senators and House members? Or do you mean like when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV twice when things feel like they’re dying down and reopens the debate?"

"Absolutely," Dunn responded. She said she received texts from Republican friends at the time who "could not believe what was going on here." She said, "then you had this decision that the Democratic Party made to ignore their primary voters and ignore their primary process, and that was a very donor-driven thing."

Dunn denied reports that Biden stepping out of the race was the result of a "coup," stating that Kamala Harris "was nothing except unremittingly loyal and supportive to the president throughout this," and that "So if you’re going to have a coup, usually someone has to lead it. And she was 100 percent terrifically loyal."

Dunn noted a letter that was sent to Capitol Hill making it "very clear to people that he wasn’t getting out," to which Lizza said, "which among some members in Congress, it backfired."

Dunn replied, "Well, I’m sure it did." Lizza asked who wrote the letter, which Dunn did not reveal, and noted a rumor that Hunter Biden had contributed to it, which "turned off some members of Congress when they heard it."

Dunn said this was not true, adding in response to the rumor turning members of Congress off, "To my knowledge, that was not the case. But I will say, he was the nominee. And so this idea that there was a discussion going on was something that we felt — and I think all of us as a senior team felt — we needed to shut down and make it very clear that he actually was not going anywhere, that there wasn’t a discussion, there was no open primary to be had out here."

Lizza later stated, "Everyone says he’s still very angry at Pelosi, Obama, Schumer, to a lesser extent," to which Dunn replied, "But he is 1,000 percent all-in for Kamala Harris. And that is absolutely true. The task in front of us is to win this election and to not let Donald Trump become president again and to win the House of Representatives, which had certain leaders in 2022 done a slightly better job, maybe we would control today, but we don’t."