Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said it’s “obvious now” that former President Biden “was not in a condition” to run for reelection, following new reporting from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson.
Khanna, who was a surrogate for the Biden campaign in 2024, addressed his previous defense of the former president and said the party must admit they made a “mistake.”
“In my limited public interactions with the President, he appeared coherent,” Khanna wrote in a post Wednesday on X.
“It is obvious now to me, based on @jaketapper and others reporting, that he was not in a condition to run for reelection, and he should have made the decision not to,” Khanna continued.
“We must be honest with people about our party’s mistake,” he added.
The statement from the California Democrat included a clip from an interview he did on Fox News’s “The Story” with Martha MacCallum, who grilled Khanna over his defense of the president and the president’s mental acuity.
“Were you telling the truth back then?” MacCallum asked, after playing a montage of moments in which Khanna defended Biden’s mental acuity in the early months of 2024.
“I was,” Khanna responded. “I had met him a few times at public events, and he was, but of course, I didn’t have the full picture. I mean, I met him maybe two times on rope lines and at public events.”
Khanna said “obviously” there should have been an open primary and that, for Democrats “to move on and move forward,” they must “take accountability and be straightforward with the American people.”
His remarks come amid new reporting from excerpts of Tapper and Thompson’s forthcoming book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
The reporting suggests members of the former president’s Cabinet were iced out toward the end of his term and that only a handful of long-time close advisers and members of his family would interact frequently with the president.
But Khanna said he doesn’t blame members of Biden’s inner circle for not intervening to stop him from running for reelection earlier.
A spokesperson for Biden criticized the forthcoming book in a statement to CNN.
“We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job. In fact, the evidence points to the opposite – he was a very effective president,” the statement said, according to CNN.