Former Speaker of the Parliament Nancy Pelosi hit Joe Biden for Delays exit from 2024 race and not allowing his party to engage in an open selection process for his replacement.

“If the president had left earlier, there would have been other candidates in the race,” the veteran Democrat said. California He said in an interview with New York Times. “The expectation was that if the president stepped aside, there would be an open primary.”

Pelosi was a leading figure in convincing Biden to abandon his own campaign after his disastrous debate performance against him. Donald Trump.

He gave the critical interview to host Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Report The podcast will be published in full on Saturday.

Democrats now face a public autopsy on the failure of Harris’ campaign after Trump cruised to victory on Tuesday and earned a second term in the White House.

Independent He has reached out to the White House and the Harris campaign for comment.

Biden endorsed Harris within an hour of dropping out of the race on July 21, and within two days announced he had gathered enough DNC delegates to secure the party’s nomination.

“And like I said, it could be Kamala, I think she would do well (in the primaries) and be stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.

“And because the president approved it Kamala Harris Immediately, this made it nearly impossible to have a primary at the time. “If it had happened much earlier it would have been different.”

The Times pointed out “Biden has gone to great lengths to defend his administration’s legislative accomplishments, many of which occurred in his first two years as speaker of the House of Representatives,” Pelosi said.

According to CNN, Biden was “seething” over Pelosi’s pressure to drop out of the race, and Pelosi admitted that she did not speak to the president after it happened.