Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

‘I’m Very Mad’: Ex-Obama Aide Says He Has No Desire To Hear Biden ‘Giving Speeches’

Screenshot/YouTube/Pod Save America

Former Obama aide Tommy Vietor said Thursday that he has no desire to hear former President Joe Biden delivering speeches due to anger about the alleged cover-up of “his decline.”

Biden gave a speech on Tuesday in Chicago that centered on the importance of social security and included attacks on President Donald Trump’s administration’s policies as well as calling for national unity. Vietor, reacting to a clip of the speech on “Pod Save America,” said he is fuming after reading CNN host Jake Tapper’s upcoming book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” (RELATED: ‘The Party Has Been Taken Over’: Former Clinton Pollster Tells Harris Faulkner ‘Far Left’ Made Democratic Party ‘Unrecognizable’)

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“Listen, I’m grateful to Joe Biden for the things he did, for his decades of service. I don’t want to hear him giving speeches right now — I’m sorry. I know that’s shitty, I know that’s petty,” Vietor said. “He doesn’t owe me anything, my opinion doesn’t matter here … I’m very mad at Joe Biden still. I’ve been reading Jake Tapper’s book about the Biden administration and the steps taken to kind of hide his decline. I can’t get into the details — it’s still embargoed — but it is enraging.”

ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith also said Tuesday that he was uninterested in Biden’s speech, which was the first he had delivered publicly since leaving office in January.

“Waste of time. Fell on deaf ears. I watched about five minutes of it,” Smith said. “I didn’t really have much interest in it. Because he’s no longer the president.”

However, in contrast to Vietor, Smith criticized Biden’s record on immigration and noted it as a reason he did not believe Biden’s remarks were valuable.

“When he was the president, there were some things that he did, like opening the borders, which were horrendous and obviously debilitating to this nation,” he said. “And because of it, that accentuated the point that he needed to go and once he saw that, the man that once promised to be a transitional president, decided that he wanted to stay and ultimately had to be forced out.”

Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna also did not seem enthusiastic when CNN host Jessica Dean asked him if he thought Biden’s speech would be “helpful” for his party.

“Well, he’s a former president. He certainly can speak,” Khanna said. “And hopefully he’ll speak out for due process of the law.”

Even after replacing Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee in July 2024 following his disastrous June 2024 debate performance against Trump, former Vice President Kamala Harris denied Biden exhibited any cognitive issues.