A former adviser to President Obama broke his silence concerning President Biden’s mental fitness on Wednesday, just hours after a damaging op-ed by actor George Clooney was published in The New York Times calling on the president to quit the 2024 race.
“It was not surprising to any of us who were at the fundraiser. I was there. Clooney was exactly right, and every single person I talked to at the fundraiser thought the same thing, except for the people working for Joe Biden, or at least they didn’t say that,” Jon Favreau, a member of the group often referred to as the “Obama bros” during his tenure in the White House, said during an appearance on CNN.
Favreau was citing the same fundraiser as Clooney in his guest essay where the actor claimed the Biden that showed up there was “not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
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Clooney wrote that Democratic Party leaders needed to stop trying to convince Americans they “didn’t see what we just saw,” and accused them of ignoring “warning signs” concerning Biden.
Favreau agreed, telling CNN, “I remember my wife, Emily, turned to me after the fundraiser and said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, there is a debate in a week. Either he’ll do well in the debate, and we’ll think he was just tired because he flew all the way back from Europe, and that’ll be that, or he’ll be like this at the debate and then the whole country will be talking about it. So, here we are.”
Favreau’s blunt comments come just a day after he joined two of his fellow advisers and members of the “Obama bros” in dedicating the majority of their latest “Pod Save America” episode to ganging up on Biden following his poor performance in the first presidential debate and in a subsequent interview.
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“I thought it was bad, and, at times, very hard to watch,” former Obama adviser Tommy Vietor said during the podcast, referencing Biden’s sit-down interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last week that came as part of an effort by Biden to quell critics calling for him to exit the presidential race.
“The debate was just a bad night. We all saw it,” fellow former adviser Jon Lovett said. “The explanations are kind of vague… That doesn’t do enough to assuage our concerns about what we saw that night. Right? So, the explanations don’t offer anything.”
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Biden has said he will not be leaving the 2024 race, and his campaign is continuing to go “full steam ahead,” as one source put it to Fox News Digital on Tuesday.
Fox News’ Kristine Parks contributed to this report.
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