Former Obama aide and Pod Save America co-host Jon Lovett admitted on Jon Stewart’s “The Weekly Show” podcast that he deliberately held back his concerns about President Joe Biden’s physical decline during the 2024 campaign.
Speaking with Stewart and fellow Pod Save America host Jon Favreau, Lovett explained that he chose not to raise the issue publicly because he wanted Biden “to f—— win.”
“I remember feeling I want to talk about this as a huge liability. To talk about this is something Joe Biden can overcome, but I’m not going to go so far as to say, ‘I think Joe Biden must drop out. He is too old to be president,’” Lovett said on the podcast. “A, because I didn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes, but B, if Joe Biden is the candidate, I want him to f—— win.”
Lovett expressed concern that his criticisms might be used against Biden by political opponents.
He went on to say that he kept his concerns to himself in order to avoid “having the words we’re saying taken out of context and all of a sudden be part of the case against Joe Biden from the right — that would use any person criticizing Joe Biden from the left as a weapon against him.”
“So it was about being honest about Joe Biden’s age as a liability while knowing that if he is the nominee, I want to be clear that I thought it was important to make sure we did everything we could to reelect him,” Lovett added, according to Fox News.
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson have recently described concerns about Biden’s health while promoting their new book, “Original Sin,” which details his physical and cognitive decline and alleges a coordinated effort by his administration to conceal it.
Lovett appears in Original Sin in an anecdote describing a White House meeting on April 26, 2024, with his Pod Save America co-hosts Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer. According to the book, the group left the meeting “deeply disturbed,” with the authors portraying Biden as rambling and “incoherent” during the conversation.
In conjunction with concerns about Biden’s cognitive decline, a growing number of Republicans and Trump administration officials are voicing new concerns over the increased use of an autopen during Biden’s last year in office. Some have speculated that Biden officials used the pen to sign documents on his behalf, including a series of highly controversial last-minute pardons, without the former president’s actual knowledge.
To that point, Ed Martin, the incoming pardon attorney at the Department of Justice and head of the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, announced last week that he is investigating the questionable use of the presidential autopen for those pardons and other executive actions.
Martin disclosed on Tuesday that his probe began weeks earlier, while he was still serving as the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, The Blaze reports.
Martin confirmed that the investigation into the autopen’s use has been active for some time, that he has contacted members of the Biden family, that several individuals of interest have retained legal counsel, and that a whistleblower has already come forward with serious allegations.
“I had a whistleblower in my office 10 days ago — senior, senior Democrat — saying, ‘Look, it was these three people that controlled access, and they were making money off of it,’” Martin told journalist Mark Halperin on the “2WAY Tonight” show. “I don’t know if I believe it yet, but the point is, I think, we have to get to the bottom of it for the American people and to protect the process, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The pardon attorney identified three individuals as key “gatekeepers”: Ron Klain, who served as President Biden’s White House chief of staff from 2021 to 2023 and returned last year to assist with debate preparations; former senior Biden adviser Anita Dunn; and Robert Bauer, former personal attorney to President Barack Obama.