Couric Presses Pelosi on Transparency About Biden's Health

Journalist Katie Couric pressed former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., about whether there should "have been more transparency" regarding President Joe Biden's physical and mental fitness for office while he was still running for reelection.

In her new book, Pelosi wrote that former President Donald Trump's family should have "staged an intervention" with him over how he handled the loss of the 2020 presidential election.

"With all due respect, Speaker Pelosi, when I read that, I wondered, couldn't the same thing be said about President Biden?" Couric asked in a Tuesday interview. "Should people have earlier determined that perhaps he didn't have the physical stamina to endure a reelection campaign and put the Democratic Party in a better position for this election?"

Pelosi shot back that Couric was "making an equivalence here that doesn't exist."

"Whether you think there's stamina to run again and serve for four years is quite different whether you are undermining our democracy in the office that you hold," Pelosi said. "And that's what Donald Trump was doing. This was about his harm to the country and his instability that he was bringing to it, and the anti-patriotic attitude he had. It wasn't about whether he was healthy enough to do this or that by physical health. It was what was happening in his distortion of the facts and how he was misrepresenting to the public. Two completely different situations … If it's just a question of if somebody has the stamina to [serve] for four years, we have addressed that. They haven't."

Couric then asked if there should "have been more transparency," despite the difference in circumstances between Trump and Biden.

Pelosi responded that "they're not equivalent," repeating her answer twice.

"But that doesn't answer the question of whether there should have been more transparency," Couric pressed. "If President Biden was too protected and kept from the public for too long, and that it put the Democratic Party at a disadvantage, given the election is less than 100 days away?"

Biden is "not the candidate," Pelosi reiterated twice.

"Should it have been dealt with earlier?" Couric asked.

Pelosi turned the conversation to the "successful NATO summit" that Biden hosted in Washington, D.C., last month and said he gave a "virtuoso performance" during the prisoner exchange in which Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and U.S. Marine veteran Paul Whelan were freed from Russian prisons.

"It was masterful," Pelosi said. "So, he has been functioning A+. Whether he would do that for another four years is a different story. But, in the present, we haven't lost anything with his service, whereas with that other guy, we were getting our democracy shrunken and diminished and our freedoms diminished."

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